Who was Zerubbabel's father?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Five witnesses agree that Zerubbabel was the son of Shealtiel — Ezra 3:2, Nehemiah 12:1, Haggai 1:1, Matthew 1:12, and Luke 3:27 — while 1 Chronicles 3:19 in the Masoretic Text alone makes him the son of Pedaiah. Both Shealtiel and Pedaiah appear as sons of Jeconiah in 1 Chronicles 3:17-18, so the disagreement is over which of two brothers fathered the post-exilic governor who led the return and rebuilt the temple altar. Zerubbabel is unusually well-anchored historically: he is the Davidide of Haggai and Zechariah, datable to the second year of Darius (520 BCE), which makes the genealogical confusion all the more striking for so prominent a figure.

The traditional harmonization is the levirate-marriage hypothesis, which runs back at least to Eusebius (Quaestiones ad Stephanum) and is revived by Archer. On this reading Shealtiel died childless; his brother Pedaiah married the widow under the levirate provision of Deuteronomy 25:5-10; and the resulting son, Zerubbabel, counted legally as Shealtiel's heir while being Pedaiah's biological son. The Chronicler would then report biological paternity and the other five witnesses legal paternity. The scenario is internally coherent and invokes a genuine Israelite institution, which is its strength.

Its weakness is that it is entirely conjectural. Nothing in 1 Chronicles 3, or anywhere else, states that Shealtiel died childless, that Pedaiah married his widow, or that a levirate arrangement explains the patronymic. The text gives no signal — no "to raise up the name of his brother" formula such as Ruth 4 or Genesis 38 supply when a levirate point is actually being made. The hypothesis manufactures the facts needed to dissolve the discrepancy.

The decisive datum is text-critical. The Septuagint of 1 Chronicles 3:19 does not read "sons of Pedaiah: Zerubbabel"; it reads, in effect, "sons of Salathiel (Shealtiel): Zerubbabel," aligning Chronicles with Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Matthew, and Luke against the MT. This shows either that the Hebrew underlying the LXX named Shealtiel — making the MT's "Pedaiah" a transmission error or a competing tradition — or that the name was unstable in the Chronicles tradition from early on. Knoppers in the Anchor Bible discusses the variant and the likelihood that Chronicles drew on a divergent genealogical source; Japhet in the OTL Chronicles treats the Pedaiah reading as a minority tradition within Persian-period family memory; Williamson reaches a similar conclusion. Blenkinsopp, on Ezra-Nehemiah, and Meyers and Meyers, on Haggai-Zechariah, note that the Shealtiel patronymic is the dominant and probably the official one, attached to Zerubbabel in his public role as governor.

The most economical critical reconstruction is therefore not a hidden levirate event but ordinary genealogical divergence: Pedaiah and Shealtiel were brothers, the memory of which fathered Zerubbabel split in the sources, and the Chronicler's Hebrew preserved (or corrupted into) the Pedaiah line while the rest of the canon — and the Greek Chronicles itself — preserved Shealtiel. This is what the transmission of post-exilic family records looks like when multiple lists circulate.

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine source/transmission discrepancy. The levirate harmonization is logically possible but textually unsupported and ad hoc; the Septuagint's agreement with the five-witness tradition points instead to corruption or a competing source behind the MT of 1 Chronicles 3:19. Not harmonized.