What Does Christ Mean by "Salt of the Earth"

"You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men."

For a long time, this passage confused me because I wondered how salt could lose its taste. However, the translation confuses the message here. The Greek moraino is translated here as "lost is its taste" but its normal meaning is "to act foolishly." Only in this passage is it ever translated as "to make tasteless," (which I guess could make sense in the sense that foolish people make tasteless jokes.)

To understand the meaning here, we have to understand the importance of salt in Christ time. It wasn't only a seasoning, but it was also used as pay and, more importantly, as a preservative. Remember, there was no refrigeration in this period and no other preservatives other than spices, of which salt was the only plentify one. This is what made if valuable enough to be used as pay. Real salt did not lose its saltiness. It was stable enough to be used as a currency. Our word "salary" comes from the Latin for salt.

So, when Christ says the his people are the "salt of the earth," he is saying that they are the valuable of the earth, that those he describes in the Beatitudes preserve what is valuable.

Salt may not lose its saltiness, but good, valuable people can become foolish. Also in ancient Greek, there was a phrase (ean to halas môranthêi ) which means to become insipid and combines the terms for salt (halas) and foolish (môranthêi) into "fool's salt" the same way we would call false gold "fool's gold." So Christ is saying here, that good people can make themselves into fools.

Another way something salty can become "foolish" is for a preserved product to go bad. In calling good people "the salt of the eath," Christ is also saying that we have been preserved or saved. However, we can still go bad by become foolish and insipid. When a salted product goes bad, it no longer tastes salty, it tastes, well, bad. A little taint goes a long way.

What happens to tainted products? Or what happens when we discover that what we thought was salt proves to be "fool's salt." Well, these bad products can't be fixed by adding more salt. They are caste out. "Trodden under foot" in Greek is metaphor for being spurned or rejected.



So Biblical scholars like to talk about saltlike fertilizers and how these might lose there effectiveness. I think this is inaccurate.

Another common meaning of salt