Asphalt
Archimandrite Nikifor’s Biblical Encyclopedia
(pitch) (Gen. 14:10; Exod. 2:3) — a mineral, otherwise called Jew’s pitch. It is extracted in liquid and soft form from mines and from the surface of the Dead Sea, from which the latter is sometimes called the Asphalt Lake. This liquid pitch becomes dry and hard in the air, like lime mortar exposed to the air. At present it is found in abundance during excavations of ruins in the environs of Babylon; asphalt is still used in that region in place of lime, or cement, in laying stone walls, houses, and the like.
It seems, however, that the plain of Shinar was especially rich in asphalt, as Strabo attests in the sixteenth book of his Geography. This asphalt, or pitch, was used by the ancients, among other things, for caulking ships, and in place of lime for laying stone walls; with the help of this cement the walls of Babylon were built; with it too was caulked the basket in which Moses’s mother placed him, setting the basket among the reeds on the bank of the river Nile. In medicine, too, the use of mineral pitch was not unknown among the Jews, as Josephus attests.