https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Abiff
Hiram Abiff (also Hiram Abif or the Widow's son) is the central character of an allegory presented to all candidates during the third degree in Freemasonry.
Hiram is presented as the chief architect of King Solomon's Temple. He is murdered inside this Temple by three ruffians, after they failed to obtain from him the Master Masons' secrets. The themes of the allegory are the importance of fidelity, and the certainty of death.
It's probably worth reading all of that page, but I'm going to skip to the Biblical reference section.
Hirams in the Bible
In the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, there are three separate instances of people named Hiram that were involved in the construction of the temple of Solomon:Other accounts of a biblical Hiram
- Hiram, King of the realm of Tyre (today, in the modern nation of Lebanon), is credited in 2 Samuel 5:11 and 1 Kings 5:1–10 for having sent building materials and men for the original construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. In the Masonic drama, "Hiram, King of Tyre" is clearly distinguished from "Hiram Abiff". The former is clearly a king and the latter clearly a master craftsman. They can be confused in other contexts.
- In 1 Kings 7:13–14, Hiram is described as the son of a widow from the tribe of Naphtali who was the son of a Tyrian bronze worker, sent for by Solomon to cast the bronze furnishings and ornate decorations for the new temple. From this reference, Freemasons often refer to Hiram (with the added Abiff) as "the widow's son." Hiram cast these bronzes in clay ground in the plain of the Jordan between Succoth and Zarethan/Zeredathah (1 Kings 7:46–47).
- 2 Chronicles 2:13–14 relates a formal request from King Solomon of Jerusalem to King Hiram I of Tyre, for workers and for materials to build a new temple. King Hiram (Huram in Chronicles) responds "And now I have sent a skillful man, endowed with understanding, Ḥuram 'abi. (the son of a woman of the daughters of Dan, and his father was a man of Tyre), skilled to work in gold and silver, bronze and iron, stone and wood, purple and blue, fine linen and crimson, and to make any engraving and to accomplish any plan which may be given to him, with your skillful men and with the skillful men of my lord David your father." The phrase italicised above is translated in the New King James Version as "Huram my master craftsman". Most translations of this passage take the "'ab-" in "'abi" as the construct state of 'abba, here translated as master. Older translations preferred to translate "'ab-" as father. The common translation of the -i suffix is "my", giving the problematic reading that Hiram was sending his own father, also called Hiram. This is found in the Vulgate, the Douay–Rheims Bible and in Wycliffe's Bible. The other reading is as the old Hebrew genitive, and some variant of "of my father" is found in the Septuagint, the Bishop's Bible and the Geneva Bible. In his 1723 "Constitutions", James Anderson announced that many problems with this text would be solved by reading "'abi" as the second part of a proper name, which he rendered as "Hiram Abif", agreeing with the translations of Martin Luther and Miles Coverdale's reading of 2 Chronicles 4:16.
- Flavius Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews (Chapter 8:76) refers to Hiram as τεχνίτης, tekhnítēs, artificer, craftsman. "Now Solomon sent for an artificer out of Tyre, whose name was Hiram: he was by birth of the tribe of Naphtali, on his mother's side (for she was of that tribe); but his father was Ur, of the stock of the Israelites."
- The Targum Sheni, an Aramaic commentary on the Book of Esther written sometime between the fall of Rome and the Crusades, credits Hiram with the construction of a miraculous throne for Solomon, which in Esther's time is being used by the descendants of Cyrus the Great.