Ephesians 6:5

[Dill]

(06-21-2020, 12:12 PM)Benton Wrote: Because He also told masters to take care of their slaves.

Which, for context, slaves in that region/time period weren't treated like later colonial slaves. Slaves he's referencing (outside of female concubines) were more similar to our minimum wage workers. They were counted as part of a family for tax purposes and often working off an impossible debt while being taken care of. Having quality slaves was a status symbol. Injuring a slave was against the law, and killing one had significant penalties (which varied considering time periods, regions and interpretations). Not the same penalties as killing a free man, but that's pretty similar to our approach to how we handle the systemic poor here, too.

Injuring or killing someone else's slave was against Roman law in the 1st century, for sure. But I don't think injuring or killing one's own was.*  You seem to be describing small household slavery, where it would not make economic sense to kill a slave. For those working the large estates outside Rome and in the provinces, killing recalcitrant slaves to maintain discipline was not uncommon at all. Antoninus Pius (d. 161 CE) passed a law making it illegal to kill slaves without cause, but the punishment was something like a fine for cost--same penalty as if a master had killed someone else's slave. No penalty if a slave dies while being beaten; and no investigation in such cases.  He did recommend that abused slaves flee to State-owned property, where charges of their abuse could be investigated. This probably does not indicate concern for the slave's well being, but more in the interest of in preserving total economic wealth of the Empire.

So far as I know, it is not until after Constantine (4th century) that Romans began incorporating Christian precepts into Roman law, giving slaves a smidgen of Persona or legally recognized power to will acts, and a bit of legal protection (of questionable enforcement). That sets the stage for legal developments to the point that killing a slave could be defined as murder in Christian and subsequently Muslim territories.

*In De Ira (On Anger), Seneca tells a story about Caesar Augustus intervening to prevent a rich man, with whom he was dining, from killing a young slave who had broken a crystal goblet. Augustus, though, was apparently contravening the law when he did this. And his motivation seems to have been in part the excessive and exotic cruelty of the punishment--the boy was to be fed to eels in the rich man's eel pond.  Augustus ordered all the man's crystal broken and the pond filled in, for good measure.