Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
"If the salt have lost his savour" (Matthew 5:13) sounds like a strange error, as if salt were being described as male.
'His' in the KJV can simply mean 'its': the word 'its' barely existed yet in 1611.
Matthew 5:13, in every translation this tool compares.
Matthew 5:13 reads, "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" "His" is functioning as a neuter possessive here, doing the job modern English gives to "its." That's not a slip: "its" was a brand-new word in the early 1600s, barely established in English, so "his" was still the default possessive for inanimate objects like salt.
Modern readers, used to "his" marking a male person, can find this jarring or think it's a translation quirk. It isn't a theological point about salt being personified: it's simply how English possessives worked before "its" fully took over that job.
