I've been thinking about Lot's wife in that Sodom and Gomorrah story in the Bible. God says don't look back and she looks back and he turns her into a pillar of salt. Being God, he could have just given her an aneurysm or a heart attack or spontaneously combusted her or struck her with lightening or any number of various things, but he (I guess, the text just says pillar of salt) transmuted her body into a more or less equal volume of the stuff which settled into a nice pile. What does that even mean? I can't find any mention of taboo about salt in the Bible, I guess it would have been a reasonably valuable commodity used to cure meat, but I have no idea what causing someone to become a large quantity of it could possibly indicate to the Jewish person of the time. Was it just a didactic story about the arbitrary nature of God which ought to be feared?