“A covenant of salt”: Salt as a major food preservative in the historical Land of Israel

Salt has been used since early times as a food preservative and as a cultural symbol. To plumb the antiquity and explore the evolution of the use of salt for food preservation in the Land of Israel we studied and analyzed a variety of historical sources (mostly textual), that will be presented and discussed after the appropriate introductions. Our main conclusion from this study is that in addition to the technological evolution of food preservation by salt, which spread throughout history to a variety of foodstuffs, the geographical perspective exerted a distinctive influence in respect of availability of salt and the climatic conditions, as did the related cultural perspective.