The Lost Word 11
Despite this profusion of rites and degrees, one stands above them all. This is the Third Degree, the degree of Master Mason, the beating heart of Masonry. The first two degrees of the Craft are preparations for it, and all other degrees are additions to it. As with most other Masonic degrees, the narrative on which it’s based is inspired by certain events in the Old Testament. According to the seventh chapter of the first book of Kings, when King Solomon built a temple to the God of Israel, the brasswork was done by a man named Hiram, a skilled craftsman from Tyre, whose mother was a widow of the tribe of Naphtali and whose father had been a Tyrian. The fifth chapter of the second book of Chronicles repeats the same story with slight variations, but refers to Hiram the craftsman twice, curiously, as “Hiram his father.”3 In the older translations of the Bible that were available in the formative years of Masonry, the Hebrew word for “his father” was mistaken for part of the name and left untranslated, and so in these translations, the name of the craftsman became Hiram Abiff. That’s all the Bible has to say about Hiram the craftsman. In the Master Mason ritual, by contrast, Hiram Abiff appears not just as a brassworker but as the master builder of the temple, Solomon’s architect and building contractor, who has control of every detail of the construction project. Even more significantly, he alone knows the Master’s Word, the great secret of the builder’s craft, and has promised to communicate it to his assistants, who are Fellow Crafts, once the temple is complete. A group of Fellow Crafts, however, decide to extort the Master’s Word from Hiram by violence; when they threaten him with death, he refuses to give the Word to them, and they murder him, hide his body, and flee. Because he alone knows all the details of the project, Hiram Abiff ’s disappearance brings work on the Temple to a standstill. Searchers are sent out to find him, and eventually discover his grave. His death has placed the entire Masonic community in jeopardy, since no one else can communicate the Master’s Word and the secrets of a Master Mason. Solomon thus establishes 3 2 Chronicles 2:14 and 4:16.