Hiram of Tyre

Hiram ruled Tyre, on the Phoenician coast. He sent cedar, carpenters and masons to build a house for David in Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5:11). When Solomon succeeded, Hiram made a treaty with him and supplied cedar and cypress for the temple in return for wheat and oil (1 Kings 5:1–12). After twenty years of building, Solomon gave him twenty towns in Galilee, which did not please him (1 Kings 9:10–13). Hiram’s sailors also went with Solomon’s on voyages from Ezion-geber to Ophir (1 Kings 9:26–28). Chronicles spells his name Huram (2 Chronicles 2:3). He is not the bronze-worker named Hiram, also from Tyre, who cast the temple’s pillars (1 Kings 7:13–15).

Josephus, near the end of the first century AD, quotes two earlier writers on the history of Tyre, Dius and Menander of Ephesus. According to them Hirom was the son of Abibalus, lived fifty-three years and reigned thirty-four, built temples at Tyre, and received problems from Solomon to solve (Josephus, Against Apion 1.112–120). Josephus puts the start of the temple in Hirom’s twelfth year in one work and in his eleventh in another (Josephus, Against Apion 1.126) (Josephus, Antiquities 8.62). These reports reach us only through Josephus, who wrote about a thousand years after the events.