Topic
Slime; Slime Pits
5 passages cited, from 1 classic reference work.
These works date from 1915 and are in the public domain. They reflect the Protestant scholarship of their time: their history, archaeology and dates can be out of date, and where they interpret, other traditions read the text differently. The verses are shown in the King James Version, the wording these works were written against.
The verses
The passages the works cite, those cited by more of them first.
- Genesis 6:14ISBE
¶ Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
- Genesis 11:3ISBE
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
- Genesis 14:10ISBE
And the vale of Siddim was full of slimepits; and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, and fell there; and they that remained fled to the mountain.
- Exodus 2:3ISBE
And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.
- Isaiah 34:9ISBE
And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.
In the reference works
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915) · 6 references
slim, slim'-pits (chemar; Septuagint asphaltos; Vulgate (Jerome's Latin Bible, 390-405 A.D.) bitumen; the Revised Version margin "bitumen"; compare Arabic chummar, "bitumen"; and compare chomer, "clay," "mortar"): In the account of the ark in Ge 6:14, kopher Septuagint asphaltos; Vulgate: bitumen; compare Arabic kufr, "pitch") does not necessarily denote vegetable pitch, but may well mean bitumen. The same may be said of zepheth, "pitch" (compare Arabic zift, "pitch"), in Ex 2:3 and Isa 34:9. The word "slime" occurs in the following passages: "And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar" (Ge 11:3); "Now the vale of Siddim was full of slime pits" (Ge 14:10, margin "bitumen pits"); "She took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch" (Ex 2:3).
Bitumen is a hydrocarbon allied to petroleum and natural gas. It is a lustrous black solid, breaking with a conchoidal fracture, burning with a yellow flame, and melting when ignited. It is probably derived from natural gas and petroleum by a process of oxidation and evaporation, and its occurrence may be taken as a sign that other hydrocarbons are or have been present in the strata. It is found in small lumps and larger masses in the cretaceous limestone on the west side of the Dead Sea, and there is reason to believe that considerable quantities of it rise to the surface of the Dead Sea during earthquakes. In ancient times it was exported to Egypt to be used in embalming mummies. Important mines of it exist at Chasbeiya near Mt. Hermon and in North Syria. Springs of liquid bituminous matter exist in Mesopotamia, where according to Herodotus and other classical writers it was used as mortar with sun-dried bricks. Various conjectures have been made as to the part played by bitumen in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Diodorus Siculus calls the Dead Sea limne asphalstitis, "lake of asphalt."
See SIDDIM; CITIES OF THE PLAIN.
Alfred Ely Day
Texts: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), from the CrossWire SWORD modules (public domain). Verse references were parsed from the works' own markup and checked against the KJV verse list.