Pitch

Pitch is a tar-like mineral substance — opaque, waterproof, flammable. The biblical references put it to two opposite uses: sealing a vessel so that water cannot enter or escape, and burning a land so that nothing can survive. Two arks of rescue are pitched watertight, and one country is turned into a stream of pitch on fire.

Sealing the Ark of Noah

The first command involving pitch is given to Noah for the building of the ark: "Make an ark of gopher wood. You will make the ark with a series of compartments, and will pitch it inside and outside with pitch" (Gen 6:14). The verse pairs the noun and the verb in the same clause — pitch the ark with pitch — and the doubled inside-and-outside coating fixes the substance's function as the seal that will keep the floodwaters out.

The Bulrush Ark of Moses

The same pairing of ark and pitch returns at the rescue of the infant Moses. The mother's improvised vessel uses two coatings rather than one: "And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen and with pitch; and she put the child in it, and laid it in the flags by the river's brink" (Ex 2:3). The materials change — bulrushes instead of gopher, bitumen as well as pitch — but the function is the same: the ark is daubed so that the river will not enter it. The pitch that saved the family of Noah from the flood now waterproofs the basket that floats Moses across the Nile.

Burning Pitch on Edom

The third reference reverses the function. Where pitch had sealed the rescue-vessel, in Isaiah's oracle against Edom it becomes the fuel of judgment poured over the land: "And the streams of [Edom] will be turned into pitch, and its dust into brimstone, and its land will become burning pitch" (Isa 34:9). The stream-water is replaced by pitch and the dust by brimstone, so that the very ground of Edom becomes combustible. The same flammable mineral that, applied in a layer, made one ark hold up under water now, poured out as the streambed and ignited, unmakes a country.