Leviticus 2:13

Hebrew Bible

11 “‘No grain offering which you present to the Lord can be made with yeast, for you must not offer up in smoke any yeast or honey as a gift to the Lord. 12 You can present them to the Lord as an offering of firstfruit, but they must not go up to the altar for a soothing aroma. 13 Moreover, you must season every one of your grain offerings with salt; you must not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be missing from your grain offering—on every one of your grain offerings you must present salt. 14 “‘If you present a grain offering of first ripe grain to the Lord, you must present your grain offering of first ripe grain as soft kernels roasted in fire—crushed bits of fresh grain. 15 And you must put olive oil on it and set frankincense on it—it is a grain offering.

Ezra 4:14

Hebrew Bible

12 Now let the king be aware that the Jews who came up to us from you have gone to Jerusalem. They are rebuilding that rebellious and odious city. They are completing its walls and repairing its foundations. 13 Let the king also be aware that if this city is built and its walls are completed, no more tax, custom, or toll will be paid, and the royal treasury will suffer loss. 14 In light of the fact that we eat the salt of the palace,36 and since it does not seem appropriate to us that the king should sustain damage, we are sending the king this information 15 so that he may initiate a search of the records of his predecessors and discover in those records that this city is rebellious and injurious to both kings and provinces, producing internal revolts from long ago. It is for this very reason that this city was destroyed. 16 We therefore are informing the king that if this city is rebuilt and its walls are completed, you will not retain control of this portion of Trans-Euphrates.”

 Notes and References

"... Leviticus 2:13 ... Whereas salt should never be omitted from your sacrifices, leaven should always be removed from your homes before the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Exodus 12:15). For other attestations of this idiom see Jeremiah 7:34; 16:9; 36:29; 48:33; Ezekiel 34:10. All of the verbs in this verse are in the singular, a sign that the subject is once again the offerer. This means that the obligation to salt the offering falls not on the priest but on its owner. By contrast, in the public sacrifices the responsibility for salting fell to the priests (Ezekiel 43:24), and the salt came from Temple supplies (Joseph and Aseneth 12.140). The salt of your covenant with your God. The idiom is used again to refer to the binding character of the priestly perquisites (Numbers 18:19) and of the Davidic dynasty (2 Chronicles 13:5). Salt was the preservative par excellence in antiquity. A figurative extension of its preservative properties is the reference to the apostles as “the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:17), in other words, teachers who guard the world against moral decay. Moreover, its preservative qualities made it the ideal symbol of the perdurability [durability] of a covenant (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan). A neo-Babylonian letter speaks of “all who tasted the salt of the Jakin tribe” (ABL 747, r. 6), referring to the tribe's covenantal allies. Loyalty to the Persian monarch is described as having tasted “the salt of the palace” (Ezra 4:14) ..."

Milgrom, Jacob Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (p. 191) Doubleday, 1991

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