Jabez

Jabez or Jabes is a male name and surname derived from the biblical Jabez, of whom the Books of Chronicles says his mother named him Jabez (Hebrew יַעְבֵּץ [ya'betz]), meaning "he makes sorrowful", because his birth was difficult.

Later people with the name include:

Pen name

 * Eric Nicol (1919–2011), Canadian author, who early wrote under the pen name "Jabez"

People

 * Jabez Balfour (1843–1916), British businessman, Liberal Party politician and fraudster
 * Jabez A. Bostwick (1830–1892), American businessman who was a founding partner of Standard Oil
 * Jabez Bowen, Jr. (1739–1815), deputy governor of Rhode Island, militia colonel during the American Revolutionary War and Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court
 * Jabez Bryce (1935–2010), Anglican Archbishop of Polynesia and the first Pacific Islander to become an Anglican bishop
 * Jabez Bunting (1779–1858), English Methodist
 * Jabez Burns (1805–1876), English nonconformist divine and Christian philosophical writer
 * Jabez Coon (1869–1935), member of the Australian House of Representatives
 * Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry (1825–1903), lawyer, soldier, U.S. Congressman, college professor and administrator, diplomat, and Confederate officer
 * Jabez Darnell (1884–1950), English footballer
 * Jabez Hamlin (1709–1791), Connecticut politician and judge
 * Jabez Delano Hammond (1778–1855), American physician, lawyer, author and politician
 * Jabez Carter Hornblower (1744–1814), English pioneer of steam power
 * Jabez Huntington (1719-1786), Major General in the Connecticut state forces, Connecticut Council of Safety member, merchant from Norwich, Connecticut
 * Jabez W. Huntington (1788–1847), U.S. Representative and Senator from Connecticut
 * Jabez Young Jackson (1790–1839), U.S. Representative from Georgia
 * Jabez Leftwich (1765–1855), Representative from Virginia
 * Jabez M. Smith, state legislator in Arkansas
 * Jabez Melville Smith, state legislator in Mississippi
 * Jabez Bunting Snowball (1837–1907), Canadian politician and businessman, Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick
 * J. Curry Street (1906–1989), American physicist, co-discover of muons
 * Jabez G. Sutherland (1825–1902), Representative from Michigan and judge
 * Jabez Upham (1764–1811), Representative from Massachusetts
 * Jabez Vodrey (1795–1861), first English potter west of the Appalachian Mountains of North America
 * Jabez Waterhouse (1821–1891), English-born Australian Methodist minister
 * Jabez H. Wells (1853–1930), American politician and curler

Fictional characters

 * Jabez Clegg, the eponymous character in Isabella Banks' 1876 novel The Manchester Man and its 1920 film adaptation
 * Jabez Dexter, the villain of the 1949 Wonder Woman comic Sensation Comics #87
 * Jabez North, the villain of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's first novel The Trail of the Serpent
 * Jabez Potter, in Alice B. Emerson's Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill (1913), the first of a 30-book series
 * Jabez Stone, the protagonist of the short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and its film adaptations
 * Jabez Stump, a secondary character in the 1989 Redwall series novel Mattimeo and the second season of the Redwall animated television show, which is also called Mattimeo
 * Jabez Wilson, a main character in the Sherlock Holmes short story "The Red-Headed League"
 * Jabez, a boat rental operator on the Thames in Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog

Surname

 * Barzillai ben Baruch Jabez, Turkish Talmudist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
 * Joseph ben Hayyim Jabez (15th century-16th century), Spanish-Jewish theologian