Salt of the earth?

by drunkenrabbit

I'm curious about salt in the context of Matthew 5:13. What does the passage mean by "salt losing its flavor" or becoming useless? Is there any context from 1st century Judaism or the eastern Mediterranean that could illuminate this?

talondearg

There are a number of options.

  1. Salt found in rocks was sometimes used, i.e. the rocks themselves were used and over time the salt could leak out.
  2. Salt collected via evaporation from the Dead Sea was often mixed with other mineral residue, again an impure salt mixture.
  3. Jesus perhaps alludes to a proverbial saying, equivalent to our "Is the Pope Catholic?", i.e. salt cannot, by definition, lose its saltiness.

The first two options would build upon the fact that salt was rarely found 'unmixed', and so what was called salt could in fact lose all its actual salt content.