Tastless Salt

"You are the salt of the land. If, however, the salt becomes tasteless, with what will it be made salty? It is no longer useful for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by people." - Matthew 5:13

As I read this verse today, I remembered how much controversy surrounds it because modern people assume that "salt" can't become unsalty. If that's true, Jesus either said something that's simply wrong, or he made a hard-to-understand point based on something impossible. I'd like to discuss this assumption.

First, when Jesus talked about salt, he meant table salt—sodium chloride. Exposing table salt to moisture can cause it to dissolve, but when the moisture evaporates, it forms back into salt. At worst, it might be a bit clumpy. Table salt cannot become "unsalty" when left to sit in a container on a shelf.

Today, when we buy a bag of salt, we expect it to be pure salt with small amounts of additives. That's because the government enforces rules about truth in advertising and food purity. But what about 2,000 years ago in Judea? Could Jesus and his audience buy pure salt? If they could, then Jesus' words don't make sense. However, we have no reason to think pure salt was available except to the wealthy. Salt was expensive, and sellers could increase their profits by mixing salt with cheap fillers. To the average Jew, this mixture was the only "salt" they knew. If they let it get damp, the salt would dissolve and slowly leech out, leaving only the worthless filler.

Careless families would buy this expensive "salt" and allow it to get damp. After a while, the actual salt was gone. Imagine their dismay and frustration as they threw the "tasteless salt" into the street! Their neighbors would shake their heads and tell their children, "Waste not, want not."

This happened often enough that Jesus used it as an illustration.

Did sellers actually mix their salt with inert material? There isn't any evidence, apart from what Jesus said. However, the Romans lowered the silver content of their standard coin, the denarius, over time. If the Romans did this with their currency, it's not a stretch to think something similar happened with salt.

Look at what the Perplexity AI said in response to my question, "What was the silver content of the denarius?" Note that I added the emphasis.

"The silver content of a denarius, the standard Roman silver coin, varied over time. At its introduction in the Second Punic War around 211 BC, the denarius was nearly pure silver, with a silver content of 95-98% . However, over the years, the silver content gradually decreased due to debasement. By 200 AD, the silver content had reduced to around 83.5%, and by 300 AD, it had plummeted to 5% purity. The denarius was eventually replaced by the antoninianus, and by the time of Aurelian, it was being minted in very small quantities, with significantly reduced silver content."