Ask any Freemason this question and he will probably tell you that Hiram Abif was the third ‘principal’ after Solomon, King of Israel and Hiram, King of Tyre, and was the architect of the Temple at Jerusalem. Your Freemason friend might then go on to say that Hiram Abif may have been just a fictional character invented by the Craft in the eighteenth century as the hero of a ‘traditional history’. ‘Of course,’ he will probably add, ‘there is no reference to Hiram Abif in the Bible.’
     Oh really? Are you sure? The Bible is a very big subject to study, and has been translated into a vast number of different languages. Let me refer you to the Second Book of Chronicles: in chapters two and four you will find mention of someone called ‘Huram my father’ and ‘Huram his father’. What does that mean?
     Well, first of all we have to remember that this book was originally written in Hebrew and Hebrew is a language that has (to our minds) certain peculiarities: for instance, its alphabet contains twenty-four consonants and no vowels at all! But how can you speak words that have no vowels in them?
     You learn by experience, by listening to others, and you then insert vowel sounds among the consonants as required. The difference between Hiram and Huram can probably be explained as the personal preference of two different speakers or writers. Next, no spoken word can therefore begin with a vowel. But even to make a vowel sound the speaker must open his throat for the sound to come out and that makes the tiniest ‘click’ which is therefore counted as a consonant. The Hebrew alphabet has quite a number of these clicks or ‘glottal stops’ varying according to the strength and volume of the words that contain them. In the past we have been informed that the Aleph ‘answers to our A’; in fact, it does nothing of the kind for it just acts as the opening ‘click’ at the beginning of almost any vowel sound. Aleph can therefore be used to open the throat before ‘A’ as in Adam, or before ‘E’ as in Eli.
     Let us now return to Chronicles and ‘Huram my fathers’. The Hiram or Huram mentioned here is a highly skilled craftsman sent to King Solomon by King Hiram of Tyre. His father (now presumably deceased) was a man of Tyre and his mother is described as a widow of one of the tribes of Israel. In fact, he possesses all the qualifications which we attribute to Hiram Abif. Can they be the same man?
     Looking now at the translations we find that the Greek version of the text just calls this man of Tyre ‘Cheiram’, the Latin version says ‘Hyram pater eius’ and the English ‘Great Bible’ of 1539 follows the idea of ‘his father’. From there it entered into the Authorised (King James) version of the Bible and stayed there until the twentieth century.
     It is true that the Hebrew word AB means ‘father’ and ABI means ‘my father’, but the phrase ‘of Hiram my father’s’ just doesn’t make sense at all and there have been one or two lone voices insisting that if a description does not make sense then the likelihood is that we are dealing with a proper name and not with a description at all.
     The earliest I could find of these is Martin Luther, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Reformation in Germany.
     In the 1520s he made his own translation of the Bible going back, where possible, to original manuscripts. It is here that we suddenly find in II Chronicles 4:16, the ‘man of Tyre’ named as Huram Abif. In 1525 Myles Coverdale, a leading reformer, finding England too dangerous, fled to Hamburg where he met William Tyndale and was influenced by Luther; by 1535 Coverdale had produced a complete Bible in English and it is in this Bible, published only in the three years 1535-37, that we find ‘Hiram Abif’ with capital letters to each word exactly as we use the name today. This is the one and only place, in the whole of English literature outside masonic ritual that I have been able to find the full name printed in this particular manner. By 1539 the Great Bible had arrived with ‘my father’ and ‘his father’ and the old name was lost again.
     Out of all this one thing emerges clearly: that in England the name Hiram Abif had appeared just once, in a little known Bible of 1535, and nothing like it was used again in Scripture for four hundred years. Yet Freemasons in 1723 were apparently so familiar with the name that they did not need to explain it.
     Can we really believe that Anderson and his brethren invented a legend and then dug out a name from a Bible of two centuries earlier to go with it? Why, they even told their candidates - as we still do today - that Hiram Abif was the principal architect of the Temple ‘...as no doubt you are well aware.’
     So, is there any reference to Hiram Abif in the Bible? I rest my case!