The King's preference for his other daughters' answers recalls a child's craving for sweets; it takes growing up a little to recognize that constant sweetness becomes cloying and sickening, whereas food tastes flat without salt. Certainly salt has been recognized from ancient times as an important seasoning and dietary necessity, a preservative, and an essential element in religious offerings.
From this literal, material value of salt has grown a considerable set of figurative meanings. One derives from its importance as "an ingredient or element that gives savor, piquancy, or zest" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary), as in the phrase "the salt of honesty." But the word is also used "with reference to the bitter saline taste of tears" ("The salt of most unrighteous tears," "Hamlet"). There is also a slang meaning of "costly, dear" (Oxford English Dictionary).
Another figurative meaning appears in the Bible, where the Lord tells Moses that the Israelites' offerings must be seasoned with salt, not honey, which, being associated with fermentation, is rejected as not being lasting; conceivably the preservative quality of salt made it an apt emblem for the faithfulness involved in keeping a covenant.
Salt is thereby linked to personal integrity, an association that is taken a step further in the New Testament, where it symbolizes the superior, enlightened quality of those who have accepted Christ: Jesus calls the disciples "the salt of the earth" (Matthew 5:13). Salt may therefore be said to symbolize the wisdom of the "elect" personality that has discovered its own absolute inner integrity and wholeness, having managed to accept and integrate the often conflicting elements the constitute the individual psyche.
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