Was Zerubbabel the son of Pedaiah or of Shealtiel?

The likeliest answer is the law of levirate marriage. When a married man died without a son, his brother was to marry the widow, and “the firstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel” (Deuteronomy 25:6). If Shealtiel died childless and his brother Pedaiah married his widow, Zerubbabel was Pedaiah’s son by birth and Shealtiel’s son and heir in law. Keil and Delitzsch explain the passages in just this way.

Each book then names the father that suits its purpose. Chronicles, setting out the family tree, gives Pedaiah, the natural father. Ezra, Nehemiah and Haggai call Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, because that was the line through which he held his place as the prince of David’s house and “governor of Judah” (Haggai 1:1), and Matthew follows the same line of succession. Luke, too, calls him the son of Shealtiel (Luke 3:27); how Shealtiel himself could be called the son of both Jeconiah and Neri is a separate question. Hebrew had no separate word for such cases: a legal heir, an adopted son and a grandson could all be called ‘son’ (ben).

An adopted heir

John Gill suspected that Shealtiel had no children of his own and adopted his nephew Zerubbabel as his heir. The result is the same: Zerubbabel was Pedaiah’s son by birth and Shealtiel’s in law. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia lists adoption, levirate marriage and succession as next of kin as possible ways.

A grandson

The medieval Jewish commentator David Kimchi, quoted by Gill, took Pedaiah to be Shealtiel’s son, so that Zerubbabel was Shealtiel’s grandson, called his son as grandsons often are. Keil and Delitzsch objected that the ‘and’ before Malchiram in 1 Chronicles 3:18 makes Pedaiah Shealtiel’s brother, not his son.

A Greek reading

Some copies of the Greek Septuagint read ‘the sons of Salathiel: Zorobabel and Semei’ at 1 Chronicles 3:19 (so the Greek text given by Blue Letter Bible), while others, followed by Brenton’s translation, have Phadaias (Pedaiah) as in the Hebrew. The Greek may be harmonising with Ezra and Haggai, so the answer above does not rest on it.

The Bible does not say which of these arrangements applied, so each is a reasoned suggestion. All of them rest on the wide meaning of ‘son’ in Hebrew, which the genealogies use throughout.