Bible Synapse
Was the mother of Hiram the craftsman from Naphtali or from Dan?
Hard question · Israel’s history: Joshua to Esther · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
Solomon fetched Hiram from Tyre: “He was a widow’s son of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre”.
And king Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre. He was a widow’s son of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass: and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass. And he came to king Solomon, and wrought all his work.
King Huram writes that he is sending a skilled man, “The son of a woman of the daughters of Dan, and his father was a man of Tyre”.
And now I have sent a cunning man, endued with understanding, of Huram my father’s, The son of a woman of the daughters of Dan, and his father was a man of Tyre, skilful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in stone, and in timber, in purple, in blue, and in fine linen, and in crimson; also to grave any manner of graving, and to find out every device which shall be put to him, with thy cunning men, and with the cunning men of my lord David thy father.
The objection
1 Kings 7:14 says that Hiram, the bronze-worker who made the temple furnishings, was the son of a widow of the tribe of Naphtali. 2 Chronicles 2:14, quoting the king of Tyre’s letter, says his mother was “of the daughters of Dan”. A woman cannot have belonged to two tribes.
The answer
The two books say different things about her, and both can be true. Kings calls Hiram “a widow’s son of the tribe of Naphtali”, and it describes his mother as a widow. Chronicles says she was “of the daughters of Dan”, the usual way of saying that a woman was born into a tribe. Keil and Delitzsch join the two simply. A woman born a Danite married a man of Naphtali; when he died she was a widow of Naphtali; she then married a man of Tyre, and Hiram was their son. As the widow of a Naphtalite she could be counted with his tribe, while by birth she was still a daughter of Dan. Each writer names the link that mattered for his account.
An older answer, given by Bähr, Blunt and Thenius and reported by Haley, is that she came from the town of Dan, at the far north of the land, the old Laish (Judges 18:29), which lay in the region of Naphtali, not far from Tyre. She would then be of Naphtali by tribe and ‘of Dan’ by town, and it would be easy to see how a woman from that border town came to marry a Tyrian. Keil and Delitzsch think this fits the phrase ‘daughters of Dan’ less well, since it reads like a tribe rather than a town.
On either answer the texts describe one woman from two angles, and neither says anything the other denies.
Still open
Neither book explains the family history, so which of the two answers is right cannot be settled from the texts.
From the classic commentators
Both statements may easily be united thus: she was a Danite by birth, and married into the tribe of Naphtali. When her husband died, she was married again as the widow of a Naphtalite, and became the wife of a Tyrian, to whom she bore a son, Hiram.Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on 1 Kings 7:13–14 (1857–78)
Bahr, Blunt, and Thenius say that she was of the neighboring city "Dan," in the tribe of Naphtali, bordering upon Tyre, hence she married a man of the latter country.J. W. Haley, Alleged Discrepancies (1874), p. 339