Salt: 1. Used to season food
(Job 6:6)2. mixed with the fodder of cattle
(Isaiah 30:24) "clean;" in marg.
of R.V. "salted").
3. All meat-offerings were seasoned with salt
(Leviticus 2:13)
4. To eat salt with one is to partake of his hospitality, to derive
subsistence from him; and hence he who did so was bound to look
after his host's interests
(Ezra 4:14) "We have maintenance from
the king's palace;" A.V. marg., "We are salted with the salt of the
palace;" R.V., "We eat the salt of the palace").
5. A "covenant of salt"
(Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5) was a covenant of
perpetual obligation.
6. New-born children were rubbed with salt
(Ezekiel 16:4)
7. Disciples are likened unto salt, with reference to its cleansing
and preserving uses
(Matthew 5:13)
8. When Abimelech took the city of Shechem, he sowed the place with
salt, that it might always remain a barren soil
(Judges 9:45)
9. Sir Lyon Playfair argues, on scientific grounds, that under the
generic name of "salt," in certain passages, we are to understand
petroleum or its residue asphalt. Thus in
(Genesis 19:26) he would
read "pillar of asphalt;" and in
(Matthew 5:13) instead of "salt,"
"petroleum," which loses its essence by exposure, as salt does not,
and becomes asphalt, with which pavements were made. The Jebel
Usdum, to the south of the Dead Sea, is a mountain of rock salt
about 7 miles long and from 2 to 3 miles wide and some hundreds of
feet high.