Then they must have traveled in wagons? Not often.
There were few roads, and wagons were not very common.
Then they went on horseback? Sometimes, but not often. In the earliest Bible times horses were only used in war, and only the kings of great countries kept a few, for their most honored soldiers to ride on.
How did they travel, then? Very often they rode on the backs of donkeys and asses. These are smaller than horses, but can go almost as fast. Do you remember how Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass, with the children shouting and waving palm branches before him? For short journeys, or in the land of Palestine itself, the ass was the animal most used.
But on many sides of the land of Palestine the roads that go out pass over country that is more and more bare, until finally the green grass is seen no more and only here and there is a small tree, and there are no flocks of white sheep, for there is nothing on which they can feed, and it is a long way, sometimes a whole day's journey, from one spring of water to another. Nothing but yellow sand and bare rocks!
SHEPHERD BOY ON THE HILLS NEAR BETHLEHEM
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood and used by special permission.
This attractive picture of the shepherd lad shows that the work of the shepherd still goes on in Judea as it did in the days of the shepherd boy, David. A writer gives this picture of the shepherd life at the present day: "Sometimes we enjoyed our noonday rest beside one of those Judean wells, to which two or three shepherds come down with their flocks. The flocks mixed with each other, and we wondered how each shepherd would get his own again. But after the watering and the playing were over, the shepherds one by one went up different sides of the valley, and each called out his peculiar call; and the sheep of each drew out of the crowd, to their own shepherd, and the flocks passed away as orderly as they came. 'The Shepherd of the Sheep, . . . when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow,' 'I am the Good Shepherd, and know my sheep and am known of mine.' These words our Lord spake in Judea."
