Shealtiel

Shealtiel (meaning: asked of God or I have asked God) was the son of King Jeconiah (Jehoiachin) of Judah, born during the Babylonian exile, and the father of Zerubbabel, the governor who led the first return of Jewish exiles to Jerusalem and superintended the rebuilding of the temple (Ezra 3:2, 8; Nehemiah 12:1; Haggai 1:1, 12). Shealtiel thus stands in the line of the royal Davidic dynasty bridging the exile and the restoration.

A textual complexity arises in comparing 1 Chronicles 3:17–19 with Ezra 3:2, since Chronicles appears to list Pedaiah rather than Shealtiel as Zerubbabel's father. Various explanations have been proposed, including levirate marriage by which Zerubbabel was legally Shealtiel's son though biologically Pedaiah's. Whatever the exact family relationship, Shealtiel is the name consistently used in the prophets Haggai and Zechariah when addressing Zerubbabel, and both Matthew 1:12 and Luke 3:27 include Shealtiel in their genealogies of Jesus Christ.