Plaster

Plaster and mortar appear across the UPDV as the wet-mix of building and the wet-mix of breaking down. The same trodden clay binds bricks in Egyptian bondage and in Babel's tower, coats the stones of a leprosy-cleansed house, carries the inked memorial of the Jordan crossing, receives the divine handwriting on a palace wall, and — under the prophets — names the false peace daubed across a doomed wall. A second sense of the word, the household mortar paired with a pestle, supplies the wilderness manna-bowl and a proverb about a fool who cannot be pounded clean.

Forced Mortar in Egypt and Babel

The earliest mention is the building-mortar of Babel: "And they said one to another, Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and they had bitumen for mortar" (Ge 11:3). Bitumen stands in for mortar, brick for stone — the substitution language pairs the wet-mix and the kiln-product as the construction-material set of the city and tower.

The Egyptian-bondage catalogue puts mortar at the head of the same pair: "and they made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and in bricks, and in all manner of service in the field, all their service, in which they made them serve with rigor" (Ex 1:14). Mortar and bricks are listed together under "hard service" and "rigor"; the wet-mix binding-material is the first-named element of the life-embittering labor.

The Leprous House: Mortar and Plaster as Cleansing Materials

A four-verse cluster in Leviticus 14 fixes mortar and plaster inside the priestly cleansing of a house struck with the plague. The renewal stage names them together: "they will take other stones, and put them in the place of those stones; and he will take other mortar, and will plaster the house" (Le 14:42). Fresh stones, fresh mortar, fresh plaster — a full re-coating of the dwelling.

The procedure allows for a recurrence: "And if the plague comes again, and breaks out in the house, after that he has taken out the stones, and after he has scraped the house, and after it is plastered" (Le 14:43). When the plague does return after re-plastering, the house is condemned: "And he will break down the house, the stones of it, and its timber, and all the mortar of the house; and he will carry them forth out of the city into an unclean place" (Le 14:45). The mortar of the house is hauled out with the stones and timber to an unclean place.

If, on the other hand, the plague does not return, the priest issues a clean-pronouncement: "And if the priest will come in, and look, and see that the plague has not spread in the house, after the house was plastered; then the priest will pronounce the house clean, because the plague is healed" (Le 14:48). The plastered surface is what the priest inspects; the absence of spreading plague on the new plaster is the visible ground of the clean verdict.

Plaster as Memorial Surface

At the Jordan, plaster becomes the medium for written memorial: "And it will be on the day when you⁺ will pass over the Jordan to the land which Yahweh your God gives you, that you will set yourself up great stones, and plaster them with plaster" (De 27:2). The great stones are the inscription-stones of the crossing; plaster is the white surface laid over them to receive the writing.

Centuries later, plaster names the surface on which a different inscription appears, this one without human hand: "In the same hour came forth the fingers of a man's hand, and wrote across from the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote" (Da 5:5). The plaster of Belshazzar's palace wall is the named surface of the writing; the lampstand throws the light, the fingers do the writing, and what receives the script is plaster.

Daubed with Untempered Mortar

The prophets put mortar to a different use again — figurative for a false peace plastered over a wall that will not hold. Ezekiel's first oracle frames it: "Because, even because they have seduced my people, saying, Peace; and there is no peace; and when one builds up a wall, look, they daub it with untempered [mortar]" (Eze 13:10). The wall is the construction-figure, the daub-verb takes the wall as its object, and the bracketed [mortar] supplies the substance; "untempered" grades the operative defect — the wet-mix has not been properly cured, so the wall it coats cannot stand.

A second Ezekiel oracle pairs the figure with explicit divine-name false-attribution: "And her prophets have daubed for them with untempered [mortar], seeing false visions, and telling them lying fortunes, saying, Thus says the Sovereign Yahweh, when Yahweh has not spoken" (Eze 22:28). Untempered-daub is the operative figure for the false prophets' work — the coating that promises peace and cannot last.

Mortar Trodden for the Siege

Where Ezekiel uses the daubing of mortar as figurative defection, Nahum names the literal foot-treading of mortar as a siege-front order: "Draw yourself water for the siege; strengthen your fortresses; go into the clay, and tread the mortar; make strong the brickkiln" (Na 3:14). The clay-pit, the trodden mortar, and the strengthened brickkiln name the wet-mix-to-fired-brick chain — a last-resort fortification labor pictured at Nineveh's wall.

Mortar as Figure for Trampled Rulers

Isaiah turns the tread-the-mortar image to international politics: "I have raised up one from the north, and he has come; from the rising of the sun one who calls on my name: and he will trample rulers as mortar, and as the potter treads clay" (Isa 41:25). The raised-up one tramples rulers; the comparand is mortar trodden under foot, paired with the potter's tread of clay. The wet-mix is named here not as building-material but as image of what the rulers become under the appointed trampler.

The Domestic Mortar and Pestle

The same Hebrew word covers a second object — the pound-and-crush vessel of the household. In the wilderness, the manna passes through it: "The people went about, and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in mortars, and boiled it in pots, and made cakes of it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil" (Nu 11:8). Mortars are the beating-vessel paired with mills in the manna-breakdown for cake-baking.

Proverbs places a fool inside one: "Though you should bray a fool in a mortar with a pestle along with bruised grain, Yet his foolishness will not depart from him" (Pr 27:22). The mortar-and-pestle pounds bruised grain in the figured scene; the fool's folly cannot be pounded out the way grain can be reduced.