("the goodness of God")
Father of a pretender to the throne of Judah who wanted to seize the crown from King Ahaz with the help of Rezin king of Damascus and Pekah king of Israel, in order to form an anti-Assyrian alliance (Is 7:6). The vocalization "Tabeal" instead of "Tabeel" is a deliberately derogatory alteration, denoting "no good" or "good for nothing". Tabeel was among those who sent a letter to Artaxerxes I king of Persia with the aim of blocking Jewish reconstruction plans (Ezra 4:7). Outside of the Bible this name appears in an Assyrian letter of the 7th century B.C.
