Can the Hebrew text help in understanding 1 Chronicles 4:9–10?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2001.
There is a play on words that sound somewhat like each other:
Verse 9a: The man\'s name is Yaʿbēts, because
Verse 9b: His mother bore him beʿōtseb, i.e. in pain.
Then in verse 10, Yaʿbēts prays that God will keep him from evil so that it may not ʿōtsǝbî = hurt, or pain, him. (The Hebrew word for 'keep' here is spelled unusually: it may be a scribal mistake.)
In other words, his mother gave her son a name that contains similarly sounding letters as the word for pain. He prays that his name may not turn out to be prophetic. It's a little bit like a man being called Payne, because his mother suffered pain at the birth.
With warmest greetings,