Shelah

Shelah (meaning: petition or sprout) is the name of several individuals in the Old Testament. The most prominent is Shelah, the third son of Judah by the Canaanite daughter of Shua (Genesis 38:2, 5). He was withheld from marriage to Tamar after the deaths of his brothers Er and Onan, which led Tamar to take matters into her own hands by disguising herself as a cult prostitute to conceive sons from Judah himself. Shelah became the ancestor of the Shelanite clan within Judah (Numbers 26:20; 1 Chronicles 4:21).

A second Shelah was a son of Arphaxad, grandson of Shem, and an ancestor of Abraham in the genealogy of Genesis 11:13–15 (called Salah). He is included in Luke's genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:35). A third Shelah was the pool and aqueduct of Siloah (Shiloah), which fed water from the Gihon spring into the lower city of Jerusalem — a distinct usage of the same root meaning a sending forth of water, referenced in Nehemiah 3:15 and Isaiah 8:6.