covenants of salt

It's trying to go up but it's having a hard time fighting the current
~ Marie-Ève Muller, Quebec Marine Mammal Emergency

Yesterday a humpback whale died off the shores of Montreal from, I suspect, spending too much time in fresh water. This struck a chord in me, perhaps because I saw it as symbolic of the solitude, isolation and lostness in our world, a world sorely lacking in salt.

I happened to be researching the word "salt". It started by looking into the meaning of the word Salem (root of the word Jerusalem), wondering if, because it started with sal, it was derived from the word for salt, and had the same root as the word "salvation".  

As a preservative, a spice, a cleansing agent, salt was highly valued for its life-preserving, healing as well seasoning properties. It was traded between Italy and Rome, and offered with sacrifices to priests and kings. Indeed, in the Torah, sacrifices offered with salt were referred to as "covenants of salt" and were replaced, in the new covenant, with the sacrifice of Jesus, Yeshua, a derivative of the Hebrew word yasha: to help, preserve, rescue, or save.

When Jesus told his disciples "you are the salt of the earth", perhaps he was referring to the gift of salvation inscribed in their hearts through his sacrifice, like the salt lacing and preserving dead meat, making the Hebrews' sacrifices acceptable to an everlasting God.

(It turns out that Salem in Hebrew means peace, or shalom; as a semitic language, its roots, as well as the roots of the word Yeshua, are held to be distinct from the Indo-European roots of the word salvation, i.e., sal. Some scholars still argue a possible connection between the two languages... maybe because of the salt roads!?)