Leviticus 14:43 - "If the disease breaks out again in the house, after he has taken out the stones and scraped the house and plastered it,"

Daniel 5:5 - "Immediately the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand; and the king saw the hand as it wrote."

From early times, people have known how to secure lime for plastering walls by burning limestone until it yielded white caustic alkaline earth. The Egyptians plastered their stone buildings, even the finest granite, inside and out, to make a smooth surface for decoration. The plasterer would put plaster on the interior walls of even the poorest houses, and usually the ceilings were also plastered. This provided a fire and rain resistant surface which could be decorated. He used a small square plate to hold small amounts of plaster and applied it with a trowel, in just the same way that a plasterer working for a builder does today.

Even the poor who couldn’t manage the better plaster were able to use a mixture of clay and chopped straw to cover their walls and ceilings. They were, perhaps, the early equivalents of our man today who works with dry walls.

Lime was also the basic ingredient for making mortar. For the first coat, lime was mixed with red sand or ashes. The finishing coat was made of white sand and slaked lime with or without chopped flax straw.