BDAG lists the primary sense of sōzō as 'to preserve or rescue from natural dangers and afflictions.' The secondary sense is 'to save or preserve from transcendent danger or destruction.' Rescue first, always. That is what the Greek says when you let it say it.

The Septuagint translators used sōzō hundreds of times to render yasha. Three centuries before Paul was born, Hellenistic Jews were reading the Red Sea and David's Psalms and Isaiah's promises in Greek, and the word they reached for was sōzō. Paul inherited that usage. He did not invent a new category. When he writes 'all Israel will be saved' in Romans 11:26, he is writing Hebrew thought in Greek grammar. The verb carries yasha on its back.

The filter arrived later. Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century imported medieval feudal logic into the word: a legal debt, a required satisfaction, a transferred punishment. The Reformers sharpened it in the sixteenth century into the full penal substitutionary framework. And from that point on, sōzō stopped meaning rescue and started meaning acquittal in every pulpit that drank Anselm with its morning coffee.

The text never asked for that. Read sōzō as yasha, and the gospel stops being a courtroom transaction and starts being what it always was. A rescue. A broad place. A door held open by a God who has not stopped opening doors since He parted the sea.