The Hard Sayings: Matthew 5:13
You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?
This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are “hard” to understand. To see a list of these verses, go to this page.
Much of the difficulty in Matthew 5:13 are all the meanings of “salt” that are lost in today’s culture. However, another problem is this verse’s context. It follows the Beatitudes and Jesus saying that we are fortunate when people mock us and we should be glad because such people also hounded the prophets.
He then contrasts his listeners with those criticizing them for listening to him:
NIV: You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
The words in boldface are those that we discuss in this article. This verse was meant to flatter and entertain Jesus’s listeners, so he made it pure fun. The verse begins with an untranslated “you yourselves,” which focuses on his listeners, but the “yourselves” is left out of the translation.
Salt as Value
The seasoning, salt, was a very important product in the ancient world. It was the most important seasoning, but it was vital for a number of other uses. In the thousands of years before refrigeration, salt was the chief form of preserving food. In Galilee, fish were the major product of the region but, to export fish, they needed to be preserved with salt. Salt as also necessary for the health of people and livestock in a desert climate. Salt retained body moisture, avoiding dehydration. People carried salt when traveling and put out salt for animals to lick. Salt was also connected to the Divine because it was used to purify sacrifices before they were burned on the altar in the Temple.
Salt was so valuable that it was used as money to pay wages. Roman soldiers were often paid in salt. Our word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt, salis. The word “salt” was also used as a metaphor for “sales,” another word possibly derived from salis. Salt was a big part of an economy that often relied on barter as well as metal money.
So, the first thing that Jesus is saying is that his listeners are, like salt, valuable. And, from the context, that they are preserving something valuable, the teachings of the prophets. They are keeping the prophets and Judean culture from drying out and dying.
Calling his listeners the salt of the “earth” meant something specific that is lost in translation. The people of Jesus’s time saw the “earth” as divided between the natural, God-made world and human society. They used two different Greek words to describe them, but they both get translated as “earth” and “world” in English. The word Jesus used here means the natural world. Jesus is complementing his listeners saying that they are God-made rather than shaped by their society.
Insipid Salt
Jesus quickly changes the meaning of salt from “valuable” like money to another form of value. And here, it becomes clear quickly that this isn’t complementary. He is referring to his critics, not his listeners. The Greek metaphorical meaning of salt was also "wit." In English today, “salty” means “biting,” and suggestive or coarse, but at the time, its primary meaning was witty. Critics always see themselves as both biting and witty. The critics of Jesus’s listeners and the prophets thought they were clever. The second sentence in this verse is a biting and witty takedown of these critics’ cleverness.
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