Why Do We Think Slavery is Evil?

[Minimalist]

Why did Rhett Butler tell Scarlett O'Hara that he frankly, didn't give a damn?  Why does any fictional character do anything.

There is no attestation of any Solomon in the archaeological record nor the historical record.  He's a biblical creation.

Oddly, there may have been a model for him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shalmaneser_V



Solomon?  Sulmanu??  You tell me.

Jerusalem...if it was even called that...in the 10th century was a miserable little hilltop village of a few hundred people.  After overrunning the northern kingdom the Assyrian empire made a vassal state of Judah in the 8th century and was, in fact, a great and rich empire.  It was exactly the kind of glorious capital which the later fiction writers of the OT used as a model for Jerusalem.  There was even a model for Solomon's so-called temple near Aleppo in Syria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain_Dara_%...al_site%29


Not only is the OT bullshit....it isn't even original bullshit.

So should I stop using Dark & Lovely shampoo?

No Solomon. That's deep. I'm going to study that.  Particularly if there are any extra-biblical writings about the queen of Sheba.

Our original discussion was about how the  Jews treated non Jewish slaves and whether the difference was due to racial or tribal differentiation. I don't even know how to begin to argue such a point here. What would race mean during that time?  Or even now. I knew a guy from Sri Lanka who had really straight hair but his skin was as black as the ace of spades. Yet. he did not think of himself as black in the same way that I am black. So what the fuck does it mean?

 I guess the first depends on how happy you are with your hair.  Long training has taught me to always say "that looks nice, dear."

There is the Kebra Nagast...but that is just Ethiopian bullshit.  There was a very valuable spice trade between Assyria and SW Yemeni kingdom of the Sabeans.  One would expect that this lucrative trade would result in extravagant wealth on both termini of the route and certainly Nineveh in Assyria qualified.  In the 8-7th centuries BC even the vassal states of Assyria along the route, Judah, Edom, Moab, prospered.  But Solomon and Sheba?  No. Just bible bullshit.  Perhaps the ruler of Sabea sent a couple of female slaves to Shalmaneser to give a proxy blowjob?  I could buy that.

Take a look at this wall painting from the tomb of Seti I.



Seti was pharaoh c 1300 BC.  Above are the various subject peoples of his empire.  Libyans, Nubians, Canaanites, Hurrians, and Egyptians....all under the watchful eye of Horus.
No one is depicted any differently.  All are Seti's loyal subjects.  Clearly the painter comprehended the difference in skin tone as well as costume but that's about the extent of it.  Egypt would have been one of the few places where different "races" came together.

Certainly people knew that there were black people in the world as in the early 7th century the 25th Dynasty (the Nubian Dynasty) pharaoh Taharqa campaigned against the Assyrians in the region.  I doubt that anyone would have regarded such a powerful king and his army as inferior to anything.