THE DOMESTIC FOWL.
There is but one passage in the Old Testament which has ever been conjectured to refer to the Domestic Fowl. It occurs in 1 Kings iv. 22, 23: "And Solomon's provision for one day was thirty measures of fine flour, and threescore measures of meal,
"Ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and an hundred sheep, besides harts, and roebucks, and fallow-deer, and fatted fowl."
Many persons think that the fatted fowl mentioned in the above-quoted passage were really Domestic Fowl, which Solomon had introduced into Palestine, together with various other birds and animals, by means of his fleet. There may be truth in this conjecture, but, as there can be no certainty, we will pass from the Old Testament to the New.
We are all familiar with the passages in which the Domestic Fowl is mentioned in the New Testament. There is, for example, that touching image employed by our Lord when lamenting over Jerusalem: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" The reference is evidently made to the Domesticated Fowl, which in the time of our Lord was largely bred in the Holy Land.
Some writers have taken objection to this statement in consequence of a Rabbinical law which prohibited poultry from being kept within the walls of Jerusalem, lest in their search for food they should scratch up any impurity which had been buried, and so defile the holy city. But it must be remembered that in the time of Christ Jerusalem belonged practically to the Romans, who held it with a garrison, and who, together with other foreigners, would not trouble themselves about any such prohibition, which would seem to them, as it does to us, exceedingly puerile, not to say unjustifiable.
That the bird was common in the days of our Lord is evident from the reference to the "cock-crowing" as a measure of time.