Building Materials

Palestine was a fairly heavily forested country (cf Josh 17:15; II Kgs 19:23, etc.). The ordinary people used the cheap local sycamore (I Kgs 10:27; Is 9:10), while palaces and the houses of the rich were built of timber brought from the Lebanon and Syria, areas rich in cedar and fir trees (I Kgs 5:8), or almug trees (a type of sandalwood, correctly called "algum") brought from Ophir (I Kgs 10:11). Timber was in fact relatively little used in Palestine.

As a great part of Palestine consists of rocky hills, stone was the most common building material. In Galilee basalt predominated, while on the coastal plain sandstone (kurkar) was much in use. Even a city as great and as important as Caesarea was built almost exclusively of this not very beautiful stone. In the hilly regions a harder limestone was available, of a quality which permitted the rough-hewn blocks to be polished and smoothed. Until the time of Solomon little ashlar was used; walls and houses, even temples and palaces, were built of rubble or roughly dressed stones.

The introduction of iron tools made stone-dressing easier. A good example of a wall built of dressed stones was found in Israelite Samaria. The stones were smoothed on three or four sides, leaving nicely dressed margins and a projecting boss. At Israelite Megiddo a different system was employed. Ashlar pillars were incorporated at regular intervals in a rubble wall to give strength to the structure. The use of ashlar became more common from the Hellenistic period onwards, and especially with the introduction of the tooth-edged chisel.

In the Hellenistic period comparatively small stones were used for building, while in the early Roman period, especially in Herod's time, large blocks of up to 30 feet (9 m) in length were employed. The stones were highly polished along the edges, leaving either a very shallow boss or a projecting boss in the center.

With the invention of the arch in the early roman period stone was also used in roofing. Granite and porphyry were imported from Egypt for columns and for facing floors and walls. It seems that marble was not imported into Palestine until the 1st century B.C.

Brick was the most common and the cheapest building material. In the earliest periods mud was formed into irregularly shaped chunks, dried in the sun and used as bricks.

Bricks were produced by a simple method. A hole was dug in the ground and filled with water. The mud thus produced was then mixed with straw (cf Ex 5:7-13) and trodden until it became a thick pliable substance. At first this was shaped with the hands into bricks but later a wooden mold was used, which gave greater uniformity. The newly made bricks were then laid out to dry in the sun. This quite primitive method was in use until the Roman period. The enormous building activity that began at that time necessitated a speedier method and the production of a much more durable brick suitable for the construction of bridges, aqueducts, large vaults and the like. It was then that the fired brick was invented, though it is possible that it was also known in the Iron Age. The Roman brick was considerably thinner than earlier ones and was square, rectangular, round or polygonal. Roof tiles were produced in the same manner, which made roofing cheaper.

Mortar, a mixture of lime, sand, ashes and water, was known in the Israelite period and was used for plastering cisterns and reservoirs to make them water-resistant. In the Roman period the quality of the mortar was greatly improved and it was used as a binding material in the construction of bridges, aqueducts, substructures of theaters, stadia, hippodromes, vaults, domes and so on. Plaster was also made much more durable and indeed reservoirs built and plastered in the Roman period still hold water today.