Hebrew word · H4420

מְלֵחָה

melechah

saltiness

Salt land: saline, barren soil that cannot support crops. It comes from melach, 'salt'.

Appears 3 times in 3 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. · Updated November 01, 2026

What it means

saltness, barrenness, saltiness

Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).

Range of meaning: Salt land: saline, barren soil that cannot support crops. It comes from melach, 'salt'.
Against the English: 'Salt land' (KJV, BSB, NIV) is accurate. The connotation of a land under a curse is invisible in English.
Used elsewhere in the period: Job 39:6 (the wild donkey's home is 'the salt land'); Psalm 107:34 (God turns 'a fruitful land into a salt waste' because of its people's wickedness). Compare Deuteronomy 29:23, where the covenant curse on the land is 'brimstone and salt' like Sodom and Gomorrah, and Judges 9:45, where Abimelech sows a destroyed city with salt.

Range of meaning: Salt ground, salt flat or salt-crusted waste. Derived from melaḥ, 'salt'. It occurs only three times in the Hebrew Bible, always for uninhabitable, unfarmable land.
Against the English: BSB 'fields of salt' and WEB 'a salt waste' keep the image. KJV 'barrenness' and YLT 'a barren place' keep the result but lose the salt, and with it the echo of Sodom and the curse tradition. Other modern versions also vary between 'salty waste' and 'salt flats'.
Used elsewhere in the period: Job 39:6: the wild donkey's home is the steppe and 'the salt land' (mĕlēḥâ), beyond human settlement. Jer 17:6: the person who trusts in man is like a desert shrub that lives 'in a salt land, uninhabited'. Related images: Deut 29:23 (Hebrew 29:22) threatens Israel's land with 'sulphur and salt, a burnt-out waste, unsown, producing nothing, like the overthrow of Sodom'; Judg 9:45, Abimelech 'sowed [Shechem] with salt'; Zeph 2:9, Moab and Ammon will become 'like Sodom… a land of nettles and salt pits'. The Aramaic Sefire treaty (8th century BC) appears to curse a treaty-breaker's land with having salt and weeds sown in it, though the reading is debated. The Greek Septuagint renders it halmē, 'brine, salt waste'.

Job · 1

Job 39:6 מְלֵֽחָה׃ [the] saltiness

I made the wilderness his home and the salt flats his dwelling.

Psalms · 1

Psalm 107:34 לִמְלֵחָ֑ה into saltiness

and fruitful land into fields of salt, because of the wickedness of its dwellers.

Here: The prefix lə- ('into') marks what the land becomes. Mĕlēḥâ, from melaḥ 'salt', is a salt flat or salt-crusted ground where nothing grows. Hearers would think of the salt waste around the Dead Sea and of the curse on Sodom.

Jeremiah · 1

Jeremiah 17:6 מְלֵחָ֖ה saltiness

He will be like a shrub in the desert; he will not see when prosperity comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.

Here: Salty, sterile ground where nothing grows. It recalls the Dead Sea basin and the ruin of Sodom, and it is a known image of land under a curse (Deuteronomy 29:23; Psalm 107:34).

Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.