Salt is spoken of in the Bible as destructive of vegetable life, and a barrier against new animal life. A piece of ground sown or strewed with salt is deemed dead land: "It is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein."[239] When Abimelech captured Shechem, "he beat down the city and sowed it with salt."[240] The Psalmist, speaking of the power and ways of God, declares:
"He turneth rivers into a wilderness, And watersprings into a thirsty ground; A fruitful land into a salt desert, For the wickedness of them that dwell therein."[241]
The prophet Jeremiah says of one who departs from God's service that he "shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, a salt land and not inhabited."[242] Ezekiel, foretelling a curse on the land of the Jews, says: "The marshes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given up to salt."[243] And Zephaniah declares that Moab shall become "a possession of nettles, and salt-pits, and a perpetual desolation."[244] Because there can be no fertility for new vegetable life, there is no room or hope for new animal life for land thus sown with salt and thus permanently sterile.
The one great body of water that is called the Dead Sea is the saltest sea in the world. Five times the proportion of salt in the ocean is found in this inland sea of salt. "No fish can exist in the waters, nor is it proved that any low forms of life have been discovered there."[245] An ancient legend declared that birds could not even fly over its waters, because of the curse from heaven on its briny depths.[246] Yet this doomed and dead sea of salt is a source of life to man in its exhaustless supply of salt for his use. Preeminently is this salt of the Dead Sea a savor of life and of death.
[245] George Adam Smith's _Historical Geography of the Holy Land_, p. 502.
[246] Tacitus, _Hist._, v. 6, cited as above.
The salt of the ocean is the world's treasure. Without it the greater portion of the earth's inhabitants would perish for lack of what vivifies and preserves animal life. Yet because of the salt in the ocean the very water, which man and beast must have or perish of thirst, is useless to both man and beast. The cry in the "Ancient Mariner" is the cry of the human, always, on the ocean's surface: