Abstract
In the Gospels, Jesus compares himself to a chicken when he seeks to gather the children of Jerusalem “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matt. 23:37b / Luke 13:34b). In adopting this metaphor, he is engaging in nonhuman gender-bending, equating himself with a female bird that has more success than he does. An Animal Studies perspective of the journey of the domesticated chicken from the rainforests of south-east Asia to the households of the Roman empire and the various roles that the chicken played in ancient society provides insight into humanity’s relationship with the chicken and supplies a new metaphor for the “domestication” of Jesus. Finally, a selection of creative uses of the image in later reception history shows how many have attempted to make the most of the winged Jesus’ lament at his own failure.
For Starters: Chicken Wings
At first glance there is not much to associate Jesus with chicken.1 One might think of Easter Eggs or the American fast-food chain Chick-fil-A.2 Yet in the Bible Jesus compares himself to a chicken when he seeks to gather the children of Jerusalem “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matt. 23:37b / Luke 13:34b), drawing on an observation of maternal avian behaviour also noted by many of his contemporaries.3 This behaviour was clearly well known in antiquity, and indeed, anyone who owned chickens could have observed it without writing it down for posterity. It may nonetheless seem odd that Jesus compares himself with a hen rather than a cock, a symbol now commonly found on church-spire weathervanes (Percy 2002: 64). As the male of the species, the cock passes into popular culture as a symbol of pride and – indeed – erection.4 Those born in the Chinese year of the rooster “are said to exhibit some stellar qualities, like resilience and courage” (Lembke 2012: 15). Manuel Villalobos Mendoza (2022: 39–42) compares Mark’s Jesus to “an apocalyptic rooster” who exhorts his disciples to keep watch through the night (Mark 13:35). In the Talmud (b. Ber. 60b) God is praised for giving understanding to the cock “to distinguish between day and night”. Yet while the cock joins the ranks of other birds that adorn crests and flags or inspire poetry, the chicken crosses the road; the humble, domestic chicken knows its place in the pecking order.5 In comparing himself to a chicken, Jesus is engaging in nonhuman gender-bending: “Jesus does the unthinkable: he compares himself to a mother hen, a female chicken.” (Alexis-Baker 2015, 325). This has been noticed by feminist theologians (e.g. Schroer 1998; Beavis 2003; Blevins 2007).6 In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus the chicken is potential prey for Herod the fox (Luke 13:32; see Alexis-Baker 2015: 220; Darr 1998: 182–183). Yet chicken Jesus remains “unflappable” in his desire to proceed to Jerusalem, the city whose children (s)he fails to gather. Jesus draws on the image of a common, domesticated chicken to highlight his own failure as a poultry prophet (Doole 2025).
I will first provide an overview of studies on the chicken and its origins and what roles it has played in human societies, before discussing birds in the Bible and the absence of the chicken, despite its importance in ancient (agri)culture. I will then show how the Romans were the first to give a significant role to the chicken in providing omens concerning imminent events. The story of the domestication of exotic jungle fowl to a household provider of eggs and meat and a harbinger of things to come provides an apt metaphor for the domestication of Jesus from an “exotic” (i.e. foreign) prophet to a consumable purveyor of sustenance and mediator of the divine. Examples from the reception history of the saying show various attempts to make the most of leftover chicken by providing a more positive version of Jesus’ lament. A final reflection on the Animal Studies approach to the gospels reminds us of the animality of the Son of Man.
Chicken Studies
Research has shown that chickens are intelligent animals (Rogers 1995; Vallortigara 2009; Potts 2012, 31–52). They decide what other chickens to associate with (Stamp Dawkins 1995; 1996), communicate with each other (Evans and Evans 1999), show self-control (Abeyesinghe et al. 2005), and learn how to recognise beautiful people (Ghirlanda, Jansson and Enquist 2002)! There are thousands of studies dedicated to the chicken, and even journals such as Poultry Science (Poultry Science Association 1921–). Chickens are easily domesticated, “to their credit and to their disadvantage” (Potts 2012: 16–17). This raises the question: Is the chicken the most successful bird on the planet (i.e. by numbers) or a hapless victim of domestication for human consumption (Balcombe 2010: 171–172)?7 Dozens of billions are consumed annually.8 The chicken does not have an enviable position within human society.
Animal Studies form part of the post-human and non-human turns in the Humanities [sic!], for the beginning of which many point to Jacques Derrida,9 even though – as Donna Haraway (2008: 334) and Susan Fraiman (2012) point out – pioneering work in Animal Studies was carried out by women and feminists overlooked by Derrida.10 In her book on posthumanism When Species Meet, Donna Haraway (2008: 265–274) includes an entire chapter on “Chicken”, and Jonathan Balcombe (2010: 3–4) begins his reflections on The Inner Lives of Animals with chickens. The magnum opus on the chicken is The Chicken Book by Page Smith and Charles Daniel published in 1975. Smith and Daniel (2000 [1975]) discuss, for example, the chicken as food with rituals and taboos across the world (27–40), the (often supposed) medicinal qualities of chicken (125–134),11 and its role in folklore (135–156). Donna Haraway (2008: 380 n. 1) describes the work as “this unique chicken book, including cultural, historical, religious, biological, agricultural, political, economic, communitarian, and epistemological points of view”.12 Annie Potts (2012: 7–12) and Janet Lembke (2012: 8–17) trace the evolution of the chicken from the Jurassic period to the fowl that sought refuge from glaciation in rainforests and spread throughout the Pacific area. Despite the claim that they were domesticated well before 6000 bce in South-East Asia and certainly by 6000 bce in China (West and Zhou 1988: 517–525), recent research points to the much later period of 1650 to 1250 bce in Thailand, with the spread of the domesticated chicken linked to the expansion of cereal agriculture (Lawler 2012; Best et al. 2022; Peters et al. 2022). Thus the jungle fowl Gallus gallus was brought by humans from South-East Asia to China and Northern India, to Persia, Egypt, and Greece (Peters 1913; Wood-Gush 1959; Lawler 2014).13 An Egyptian ostracon dated to the late second millennium bce appears to show a painting of a cock (Carter 1923; Houlihan 1996: 204 Fig. 141), but there remains uncertainty concerning the arrival of the chicken in Egypt (e.g. Peters 1913: 388–389; Lowe 1934).14 It certainly gained significance in the Ptolemaic period (Coltherd 1966), and there is no evidence to substantiate the commonly found claim that a mass egg industry fed those who built the pyramids (e.g. Smith and Daniel 2000 [1975]: 14; Haraway 2008: 265; Potts 2012: 13; Lembke 2012: 18).
Compared with the hen’s egg, no other single food of animal origin is eaten and relished by so many peoples the world over; none is served in such a variety of ways. Its popularity is justified not only because it is so easily procured and has so many uses in cookery, but also because it is almost unsurpassed in nutritive excellence.
romanoff and romanoff 1949: 575
Who first prevailed on domesticated hens to produce a surplus of eggs over and beyond any they intended to set and hatch and by what strange blandishments they brought off one of the most notable coups in history will never be known.
smith and daniel 2000 [1975]: 33
Their initial use was for fighting and for decoration rather than their eggs, and this will have led to their selection (Wood-Gush 1959). Cockfighting played an important cultural role (see Smith and Daniel 2000 [1975]: 69–124; Potts 2012: 17–18 and 64–73; Lembke 2012: 14–17). Philo (Prob. 131–133) recounts a story of Miltiades attending a cock-fight with his soldiers to give them courage to resist the Persians, and Pliny the Elder (Nat. 10.24) describes the spectacle of the cock-fight.
[W]e lack the zeal displayed by the Greeks who prepared the fiercest birds they could find for contests and fighting. Our aim is to establish a source of income for an industrious master of a house, not for a trainer of quarrelsome birds.
Thus with time the hen became valued for her eggs, and indeed remained for a long time much more a source of eggs than of meat (Smith and Daniel 2000 [1975]: 343). This was the (agri)cultural understanding of the chicken at the time of Jesus.
The Chicken among the Birds of the Bible
Birds are found throughout the Bible (cf., e.g., Eidevall 2006; Landy 2023), and the Bible associates birds with flight: in the creation account of Gen. 1 God creates birds alongside fish, birds for the sky and fish for the sea (Gen. 1:20–23).16 Adam gives birds their names (Gen. 2:19–20), and certain birds lend their names to people (Jonah is a dove, Zipporah a sparrow). Noah sends birds out from his ark (Gen. 8:6–12), including the raven, a bird seen as a messenger and a guide in Mesopotamia and Ugarit (see especially Moberly 2000 and Marcus 2002).17 God provides ravens with food (Ps. 147:9; Job 38:41), while they provide Elijah with food (1 Kgs 17:2–6), even though, as carrion birds, they would just as soon have eaten Elijah!18 Indeed, there is an ever-present threat of having one’s unburied corpse consumed by birds (Deut. 28:26; 1 Kgs 16:4; Jer. 19:7; Rev. 19:21), birds will overrun a barren city (Isa. 34:11), and bad children will have their eyes pecked out by birds (Prov. 30:17). Birds are found even in the desert (Isa 34:13–15), though when God brings the Israelites quail in their time of need, he subsequently punishes them for having eaten (Num. 11:31–34). Solomon imports peacocks (1 Kgs 10:22 / 2 Chron. 9:21) and his daily royal table includes some form of fatted fowl (1 Kgs 4:23), perhaps geese or ducks, “a luxury” at the time (Peters 1913: 365).19 There is often uncertainty as to what bird is being discussed in Hebrew: an eagle or a vulture in Deut 32:11 (Schroer 1998: 267), an ostrich or a sand-grouse in Job 39:13a (Walker-Jones 2005). And, like a bird, God himself has wings, wings that can carry his young (Deut. 32:11b) and provide healing (Mal. 4:2) and refuge (Ps. 91:4). As with the sacrificial goat and the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16), so too there is a ceremony to mark the end of a skin condition involving the killing of one bird and setting of another free (Lev. 14:1–7).20 Birds provided an affordable option for those who could not afford to offer a female lamb or goat as a sin offering (Lev. 5:7–10).21 Yet there was also the option of flour for those for whom even two birds were too expensive (Lev. 5:11–13). In the Book of Jubilees (Jub. 11.17–20) a 14-year-old Abram commands clouds of ravens not to consume the seed sown in fields, and there is an “Apocalypse of the Birds” in 1 Enoch (Dugan 2023), in which, however, chickens play no role.
There are also roles for birds in the New Testament. A spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove (Matt. 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32), perhaps as a divine messenger/carrier-pigeon (Eyl 2023).22 In the canonical gospels Jesus discusses the price of sparrows (Matt. 10:29–31 / Luke 12:6–7) and invites his audience to “consider the ravens” (Luke 12:24). He asks who in their right mind would give a child a scorpion if they ask for an egg (Luke 11:12)! He speaks of a mustard seed that grows into a large tree and provides either shade (Mark 4:30–32) or branches (Matt. 13:31–32 / Luke 13:18–19) for the birds to make nests; while chickens and other ground-dwelling birds might make use of the shade, Mark’s phrasing “the birds of the air/heaven (τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ)” seems to imply what Matthew and Luke understand: nesting in branches (pace Zimmermann 2023: 14–16). According to Paul, birds have a different kind of flesh from humans, animals, and fish (1 Cor. 15:39). There is a distinct role for eagles (or other birds of prey) which can fly “in mid-heaven” (ἐν μεσουρανήματι) in Rev. 8:13 and 19:17 (see Rollens 2023); this is not something the domestic chicken can hope to achieve.
So where is the chicken in the Bible? There is some debate as to whether chicken was on the menu in ancient Israel (MacDonald 2008: 36).23 Thomas Staubli (2008) has argued that the sacrificial turtledoves were not turtledoves at all, rather chicken,24 but zooarcheological evidence suggests that the bird concerned was wild partridge (Altmann and Spiciarich 2020). By the time of the Greeks and Romans, chickens were aplenty in society, including in Jerusalem (Altmann and Spiciarich 2020: 7, 10–13, 30).25 The Mishnah (m. ‘Ed. 6.1) contains a report that a chicken was stoned to death in Jerusalem because it had killed a human being (Qimron 1995: 474 n. 8; Magness 2011a: 48 and 2011b: 358; Villalobos Mendoza 2022: 39), and the canonical gospels certainly see no problem in the idea that a rooster would be found within earshot of the High Priest’s house (Matt. 26:74; Mark 14:68; Luke 22:60; John 18:3).26 Gen. Rab. 54.4 includes God’s statement regarding the ark of the covenant being in Philistia (1 Sam 4–5): “Had one of them lost a chicken, he would have gone around to many doors [of his neighbours] in order to recover it.” This provides a poultry parallel to the lost sheep of Matt. 18:12–14 / Luke 15:3–7 / Gos. Thom. 107.
Would Jesus have eaten chicken? The gospels do not tell us whether he ever did, and one might argue that he seems to have preferred fish.27 Chicken is by no means ritually unclean, as non-kosher birds are birds of prey or carrion (Lev. 11:13–19; Deut. 14:11–18; see Milgrom 1991: 661–664). Indeed, chicken became a favourite food of ancient Jews, reflected in debates as to whether to allow chickens in the Temple precinct (11QTc) or in Jerusalem at all (m. B. Qam. 7.7), as they might spread impurities they collect while foraging (Peters 1913: 371; Qimron 1995: 474–475; Magness 2011a: 47–48 and 2011b: 358; Watts 2013: 218; Villalobos Mendoza 2022: 38).28 The Qumran community appears not to have raised or consumed chickens, perhaps seeing their settlement as a “sacred desert camp” (Magness 2011b: 362). Richard Redding (2015: 355–356) reflects on the success of the chicken given the taboo of pork, as chicken is a “a more efficient source of protein”, produces “the egg, which is also a more efficient source of protein”, is smaller and hence more easily transported and quickly and easily consumed in a household. Thus the chicken and her eggs proved a great success in antiquity, and it is certainly possible that Jesus and his disciples would have eaten chicken. Yet, unlike with the many other birds found in the Bible, a connection between the chicken and the divine was by no means obvious. The Romans, however, saw prophetic potential in the domestic hen.
Augury
Plato had defined man as an animal, biped and featherless (ἄνθρωπός ἐστι ζῷον δίπουν ἄπτερον), and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl (τίλας ἀλεκτρυόνα) and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, “Here is Plato’s man.”
The hen is much more reclusive in Greek culture. Nonetheless, the fables of Aesop include a hen which will not lay because it is overfed (Perry 1952: 344 [Greek] and 1965: 431 [English]) and a hen that chooses to sit on the eggs of a snake and will surely become their victim (Perry 1952: 398–397 [Greek] and 1965: 458 [English]). Aelian’s encyclopedic On The Nature of Animals concludes with a report on a temple of Heracles and Hebe at which cocks and hens are kept separately, except for once a year when the cocks fly over to the hens for the purpose of procreation (Aelian, Nat. an. 17.46; cf. Aristotle, Hist. an. 9.8).
In general, the Greeks paid more attention to birds whose flight paths by day and calls by night could be interpreted as omens from the gods (Mynott 2018: 249–266 and 323–334). These could be interpreted by the practice of augury (or “ornithomancy”). The practice was so commonplace that the word for “bird,” ὄρνις, could be used as a metonym for “omen” (as highlighted by the chorus in Aristophanes, Birds 716–719). Birds were “the principal agents through which the gods revealed their will to humans” (Mynott 2018: 249).30 Birds might thus choose to close the border between heaven and earth, as in Aristophanes’ Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.31 Eagles (the bird of Zeus) are the species most often referred to in military contexts, perhaps because as predators “they had a visceral relationship with animal entrails, the interpretation of which (haruspicy) constituted another branch of the discipline” (Mynott 2018: 254). The Septuagint explicitly bans the use of birds in divination: οὐδὲ ὀρνιθοσκοπήσεσθε (Lev. 19:26 lxx).32
Unlike the Greeks, “The Romans gave a central role in augury to the domestic chicken.” (Mynott 2018: 260) The chicken behaviour to interpret was neither flight paths nor calls, but how they eat (see especially the detailed discussion in Linderski 1986). The chicken-keeper (pullarius) would put out grain for the chickens and watch their feeding, whether they ate greedily and even dropped food while doing so, or refused to eat. This meant that caged chickens could be brought out and consulted at any point, even during a military campaign; they were “readily available and relatively dispensable” (Mynott 2018: 265). According to Livy (Ab Urbe condita 10.40), Lucius Papirius Cursor prepared his men for battle against Samnium and consulted his pullarius in the night; the pullarius saw that the chickens did not eat, but reported that they had, and only the death of the pullarius when placed on the front line of the battle brought reprieve to the Roman army.
Appius Claudius Pulcher (97–49 bce) was a famous augur whose treatise Liber auguralis argued strongly for the practice (Cicero, Div 2.75; Leg 2.32).33 His belief in the practice contrasts to the fate of his great-great-great-grandfather Publius Claudius Pulcher, who lost the battle of Drepana after ignoring the fact that the sacred chickens on his ship had refused to eat and throwing them into the sea (Suetonius, Tib. 2.6; Cicero, Nat. d. 7.2). In his On Divination, Cicero – who was himself a member of the augural college – puts forward in two volumes the cases for and against the use of augury because the practice clashed with Greek philosophical discourse.34 Augury was one aspect of Roman culture that Augustus sought to revive (Green 2009).
The use of chickens in augury “was deeply embedded at the centre of Roman political and religious life, defined and regulated in the written tradition of the priestly books; it made sense according to the logic of the symbolic inheritance of Rome and Roman views of the operation of the gods in the world” (Beard 1986: 41). So by the time it reached Rome, the chicken was seen both as food35 and as a suitable subject for philosophical enquiry, for example in the writings of Columella, Pliny the Elder, and Varro, who each discuss strategies for breeding, egg production, fattening, and care (Smith and Daniel 2000 [1975]: 18–26; Lembke 2012: 28–34). It was the Romans who had the most regard for the role of the female domestic chicken as a decision-maker or mediator in matters political, military, and mundane.36
Domesticating Jesus
The exotic jungle fowl of South East Asia that had been adopted by human society for its decorative and entertainment value came to be valued for its eggs and meat, and was thus domesticated both as a source of protein and eventually as a source of information regarding future events. A parallel can be drawn to the domestication of an exotic Galilean Messiah into Christianity: migrating westward not by flight but through human transportation, the colourful and aggressive male specimen lost its relevance to the egg-producing female, as the hen became more prized for its sustenance than the cock for its entertainment value.37
The apocalyptic prophet from Nazareth whose visit to Jerusalem saw him executed by the Roman authorities also eventually came to be seen as a provider of (spiritual) sustenance. He too can be consumed. Indeed, he designates himself as bread (John 6:35), provoking confusion among his audience and the question: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52). His (enigmatic) answers are, “Whoever chews my flesh (ὁ τρώγων μου τὴν σάρκα) … has eternal life” and “My flesh is true food (ἀληθής βρῶσις)” (John 6:54–55). Meredith Warren (2015: 187–244) distances this saying from eucharistic interpretations and places it rather in the context of the Graeco-Roman hero whose death at the hands of a god leads to a cultic meal. Stephen Moore (2017: 116–119) also discusses the consumption of the nonhuman Jesus in the Gospel of John: Jesus as bread, water, vine, and lamb. But the Gospel of John contains among its ingredients neither chicken nor egg, only a rooster (John 13:38 and 18:27). It is the Gospels of Matthew (23:37b) and Luke (13:34b) that provide us with the gender-bending non-human Jesus.
The chicken is not a bird easily associated with Jesus. The spirit does not descend upon Jesus in the form of a chicken at his baptism, and there is no mention of chicken at the Last Supper. The ritual involving two unspecified birds following the cleansing of a skin disease (Lev. 14:1–7) is not taken up in the gospels (e.g. the cleansed lepers in Matt. 8:1–4; Mark 1:40–45; Luke 17:11–19), and would surely have proven less appealing as a typology than the goats of Lev. 18, which perhaps lies behind the two “Jesuses” of Matt 27:15–26 (Moscicke 2020). It is later Judaism which adopts the chicken in developing the kapparot tradition of swinging a cock (for men) or a hen (for women) above one’s head and then offering it as expiation for one’s sins on the eve of the Day of Atonement (Peters 1913: 371; Smith and Daniel 2000 [1975]: 38–39; Percy 2002: 63; Beavis 2003: 123–124; Potts 2012: 79–80; Staubli 2008: 368; Watts 2013: 220).
The hen’s attempt to gather her chicks under her wings provides Jesus with an image of protection to which he can only aspire. There is no hint of self-sacrifice in the metaphor. N.T. Wright (1996: 570–571) proposed that the mother hen is protecting her chicks in a farmyard fire(!), and that the chicks survive while she is “scorched to death”. But (surely!) everyone knows that chicken wings can be burned/burnt, thus Jonathan Rowlands (2019: 128) is correct to point out that not only is there no hint of a farmyard fire in the text but that chicken wings would provide poor protection. Wright’s proposal of parental self-sacrifice has surely more to do with Jesus as a God-man than with Jesus as a chicken-woman.38
The behaviour of a hen and her chicks was easily observable in antiquity as the chicken was living within human society.39 The protective use of her wings could be seen every day (Tilton 2014; Theobald 2022: 158). As a bird, the chicken should be a celestial being, whose flights and calls bring messages from the gods. Yet chickens do not look down on us from the heavens, rather we look down on them underfoot. The only divine role left for the chicken was as a packaged and portable provider of “omens for Romans”.
Like the chicken, Jesus himself is conspicuously absent in the Hebrew Bible. Yet the ancient role of the domesticated chicken was taken over by the domesticated Jesus, the nonhuman who lives among us, a divine figure descended from the heavens to the earth to provide daily sustenance. Jesus thus has much more in common with the chicken than at first glance; what is needed is a bird’s-eye view, albeit that of a bird looking up from the dirt of the farmyard floor.
Leftovers
The image of Jesus as a hen gathering her chicks appears in later tradition in a number of ways, enjoying an interesting reception history in literature, song, art, and social media.40 Various actors across history with different media and aims have adopted and adapted the motif. The major aspect that tends to be omitted, however, is Jesus’ failure. The gospel Jesus seeks to gather the children of Jerusalem “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” but “you” (i.e. the children of Jerusalem now addressed in the second person plural) were unwilling (Matt 23:37b / Luke 13:34b).41 The “received” chicken will succeed where the gospel Jesus failed.
There is a parallel to the saying of Jesus in the Latin of Ezra (2 Esdras 1:30): “I gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings (ita vos collegi ut gallina filios suos sub alas suas).” This text is possibly Christian and may be directly dependent on the Gospel of Matthew (Stanton 1977; Longenecker 1995: 116–118; but see the note of caution in Kraft 1986: 166).
A hen often used to gather her chicks under her wing (sub ala sua), especially to protect them against the kite. Once when a kite was flying overhead she called her chicks and they all came under her wings except one that had found a worm and was pecking at it. Then the kite swooped down and carried off that chick. […] Thus the Lord calls us to flee from sin and to seek protection under his wings. [… W]e flee to the wings of the crucified one.
Latin text: perry 1952: 632; English translation perry 1965: 541
The image of outstretched wings is here connected to the image of the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross.
They follow their chicks with such great love that, if they see or spy at a distance any harmful animal, such as a kite or a weasel or someone even larger stalking their little ones, the hens first gather them under the shadow of their wings, and with this covering they put up such a very fierce defense – striking fear into their opponent in the midst of a frightful clamor, using both wings and beak – they would rather die for their chicks than seek safety in flight.
trans. smith and daniel 2000 [1975]: 162.
The idea that the hen would sacrifice her own life to save her chicks may come from the Christ motif, an idea already associated with the pelican in Christian antiquity (see Nicklas and Spittler 2016).
3 And it came to pass that there came a voice again unto the people, and all the people did hear, and did witness of it, saying: 4 O ye people of these great cities which have fallen, who are descendants of Jacob, yea, who are of the house of Israel, how oft have I gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and have nourished you. 5 And again, how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, yea, O ye people of the house of Israel, who have fallen; yea, O ye people of the house of Israel, ye that dwell at Jerusalem, as ye that have fallen; yea, how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye would not. 6 O ye house of Israel whom I have spared, how oft will I gather you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if ye will repent and return unto me with full purpose of heart.
3 nephi 10.3–6
In this text, God gathered and nourished the house of Israel in the past and indeed will do so again if they repent and return to him, yet there were also unsuccessful attempts to gather them, for “ye would not”.
In his discussion of the reception history of this verse Ulrich Luz (1997: 381 n. 40) points to two hymns in the Evangelisches Gesangbuch. The first is “Nun ruhen alle Wälder” (477,8):
Again there is a positive angle on the motif, as this time Jesus is implored to take the individual speaker (or singer) under his wings. Likewise in “Ist Gott für mich, so trete gleich alles wider mich” (351,6):
There is no indication that Jesus’ offer is being rejected.
The Roman Catholic church Dominus flevit is found on a hill outside Jerusalem where it is claimed Jesus lamented (Luke 19:41). While this lament is not connect with the “woe” over Jerusalem in Luke (Luke 13:31–35), the church commemorates this verse on the altar from 1955 with a mosaic of “a great hen with outspread wings under which are sheltering a mass of little yellow chicks” (Johnson 1992: 289 n. 39). The surrounding text reads: Jerusalem Jerusalem quoties volvi congregare filios tuos quemadmodum gallina congregat puilos suos sub alas et nolvisti Matth. 23.37. All chicks are safely under the outspread wings of the Christ-hen. The size of the comb is notable, as comb size is “an indication of androgenic activity” (Wood-Gush 1959: 323): the hen successfully sheltering her chicks in the mosaic has a rather masculine comb.
Finally, social media provides essentially two forms of artistic representation of Jesus “as a chicken”. The first is ai-generated artwork which often produces a hybrid Christ figure with avian features. The second are pictures of hens gathering chicks with the Bible verse (from Matthew or Luke) overlayed to form a “meme”, many of which even drop the “and ye would not” and show the chicks safely protected, thus omitting the aspect of failure found in the gospels.
Each of these receptions of the saying of Jesus provides to a certain degree a positive spin on the “failure” aspect. God simply gathers his people in 2 Esdras; the hen provides protection for all but one obstinate chick in Odo’s fable; Aldrovandi adds active resistance to the predator – even unto death! – in his naturalist observations; in the Book of Mormon God reflects on how he has gathered his people in the past and will gather his people in the future, despite the times when “ye would not”; hymns addressed to Jesus implore him to succeed in protecting the singer as his metaphorical chick; the altar of Dominus flevit shows a successful and rather masculine bird raising its wings over chicks; and social media representations tend to show successful hens gathering their chicks, often leaving out the final “you were unwilling” from the verse quoted. These “leftovers” thus demonstrate various attempts to make the most of the remains of chicken Jesus by adopting the metaphor and adding just enough sauce to make it palatable.
Taking (Chicken) Stock
Animal Studies provides a timely reminder of the perspective of the nonhuman.42 Yet in industrialized and globalized societies the most likely contact with chicken is not with a living bird but with its carcass.43 The consumable Jesus is also slaughtered (once a day or once a week) and hung up on a cross like a rotisserie chicken. But Jesus is a chicken who will rise from the dead like a phoenix.44 His is not the same fate as that of Antiochus iv (2 Macc 9:9) and Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12:23) who are eaten by worms. Rather Jesus himself threatens with the immortal worm (Mark 9:48, based on Isa. 66:24), but a worm is no match for a chicken.
Page Smith and Charles Daniel (2000 [1975]: 41) lament that the turn from Roman natural sciences to Christian theology led to a decline in interest for the domestic chicken. Yet the theological image of a God with wings (Wilson 2015: 199–200) may have been adopted from the “winged protective goddesses” of Egypt (1998: 267 n. 8) and thus present “God as a magnificent bird” (1998: 264) or “God as a big brood hen” (1998: 281). For Mary Ann Beavis (2003: 127) this provides a timely reminder about the use of metaphors, as God is no more “a big mother bird up in the sky” than “a king on a heavenly throne”. God is no less avian or female than he is anthropomorphic or male. The same applies to Jesus, who laments his own failure to live up to the success of a maternal hen and whose once untamed exoticism has been domesticated to provide daily sustenance for believers.
[I]ndistinction theorists attempt to develop ways of thinking about human beings, animals, and ethics in a manner that radically displaces human begins from the center of ethical reflection and that avoids many of the exclusions associated with lingering forms of anthropocentrism.
For Calarco (2008: 143), this approach stresses that, “the human/animal distinction is, strictly speaking, nonsensical”. Jesus as a god-man is thus equally a god-animal, in his own words a goddess-chicken. Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem points to a much less anthropo-centric and andro-centric christology in the gospel tradition. The figure “like a son of man” in Dan. 7 – which provides the gospel Jesus with his preferred self-designation – is found among the beasts in Daniel’s heavenly vision. And in seeking to gather chicks under his wings, the lamb of God takes on the form of a chicken to remind us of our place in the animal kingdom of God.
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I deliberately use the singular and collective term “chicken” as it maintains ambiguity as to whether it refers to the bird or to its meat.
On the Easter Egg, see Newall 1971. On the Christian fundamentalist founding, history, and policies of Chick-fil-A, see the founder’s own book Cathy 2002. In the context of Animal Studies, Rowe 2013 provides a reminder that the debate surrounding Chick-fil-A’s policy on lgbtq+ people draws attention away from other victims, namely the chickens themselves.
The image of a mother hen protecting her chicks or eggs under her wings can be found in Aristotle, Hist. an. 9.8; Alpheus of Mitylene, Anth. Pal. 9.95; Plutarch, Am. prol. 2.; Oppian, Cynegetica 3; Leviticus Rabbah 25.5; and m. Ḥul. 12.3. See the detailed discussion in Doole 2025.
As with the Hebrew word for “male” – גבר – which came to mean “cock” by the time of Jerome and the rabbis “as a euphemisum for membrum virile”, i.e. the penis (Peters 1913: 366).
A term first articulated by Schjelderup-Ebbe 1935.
Yet see the sceptical note of Elaine Guillemin (2002: 256): “The implied reader is encouraged to adopt the narrator’s androcentric perspective in which the female imagery is significant and yet insignificant.”
In 2022 the number of chickens killed annually for their meat was estimated at 75.21 billion (https://ourworldindata.org/animal-welfare).
Derrida 1999; typical of Derrida in the title “L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre)” is the play-on-words of “je suis” which could equally mean “I follow”; thus Fraiman (2012: 97) comments: “[H]e names himself an animal while also questioning the putative precedence of human animals before all others.” For discussion and critical appraisal of Derrida and Animal Studies, see Badmington 2007; Lawlor 2007; Calarco 2008; Lundblad 2009; Calarco 2015: 34–47; Still 2015.
Animal Studies has even managed to burrow its way into Biblical Studies with, for example, the work of Stephen Moore (2014a; 2014b; 2017), Ken Stone (2018), and Hannah Strømmen (2018). Cf. also Sherman 2020, Atkins 2023, and Remington, Millar and Jeong 2023. Atkins 2024 examines the book of Ruth as the only text of the Hebrew Bible not to include animals, despite featuring a famine, a harvest, and a threshing floor. See Spittler 2008 for a study of animals in the apocryphal acts of the apostles and Berkowitz 2018 for animals in rabbinic literature.
Cf. Lembke 2012: 48–55.
Cf. also Squier 2010 for a literary and cultural study of the chicken.
In Aristophanes, Birds 481–485, Pisthetaerus claims the cock was king over Persia before any Persian kings, and that is why it is called “the Persian bird”; this shows that the Greeks were aware that the chicken came to Greece via Persia (cf. Lembke 2012: 25).
In Egypt it was the ibis, associated with the god Thoth, that was both domesticated and worshipped for the protection it provided from snakes and other vermin (cf. Cicero, De natura deorum 1.36). Herodotus claimed that anyone who killed an ibis – even by accident – would be put to death (Herodotus 2.65), and there was said to be an immortal ibis in the sanctuary at Hermopolis (Aelianus, Hist. ant. 10.29). For a detailed study on the extent of and the expense involved in the ibis cult in Egypt, see Smelik 1979.
Aristotle (Metaphysics 12.1073a) frames the same question in terms of humans and sperm: οἷον πρότερον ἄνθρωπον ἂν φαίη τις εἶναι τοῦ σπέρματος, οὐ τὸν ἐκ τούτου γενόμενον ἀλλ᾽ ἕτερον ἐξ οὗ τὸ σπέρμα. He does not discuss the issue with regard to birds and eggs (both of which he describes in great detail in Hist. an. 6.1–9 and 9.7–36). The widespread mis-reference to Aristotle having raised the question appears come from Fénelon 1825 [1740]: 202.
This of course stands in conflict with the modern satirical conspiracy theory that “Birds aren’t real”. See McIndoe and Gaydos 2024.
According to Plutarch (Life of Alexander 27.2–3) ravens also guided Alexander and his troops.
See especially the excellent recent study of Elijah’s blackbirds by Elser 2024.
Altmann and Spiciarich (2020: 9) point to the fact neither geese nor ducks appear as sacrificial offerings.
Milgrom (1991: 838) explains that the disease is transferred to the bird (which then carries it away) and argues that the rite was taken over from neighbouring cultures and maintained due to its popularity rather than any theological significance in priestly circles.
Milgrom (1991: 167) and subsequently Watts (2013: 218) both point out that there was no requirement for birds to be male/female or unblemished, making them all the more affordable for the poor.
Watts (2013: 221–222) points to Philo (De Providentia, fragment ii, 64) to argue that rock pigeons, as cliff-dwelling birds, seek tall building in cities which tended to be temples, and thence the association with gods and goddesses.
See Torrey 1921/1922, Taran 1975, and Feliks 2007 [1972], for discussion of seals and a pitcher with images of cocks dating to the monarchy in Judah.
This argument was taken up by Watts (2013: 218–221), as it allows him to solidify the sacrificial scheme proposed by Milgrom 1991 in which only domesticated animals are sacrificed in P. The lxx and the Targums both translate tor as turtle-dove, which Milgrom (1991: 168) argues were “domesticated and plentiful in biblical times,” though he allows for wild birds also potentially being included in sacrifice.
According to the Talmud (b. Giṭ. 57a) a married couple should be fruitful and multiply “like chickens” (Peters 1913: 370; Feliks 2007 [1972]; Beavis 2003: 123).
Tilton 2014 calls this rooster “the most famous chicken in the New Testament.”
See for example his calling of fishermen (Matt. 4:18–22 / Mark 1:16–20) and instructing them on how to fish (Luke 5:1–11; Matt. 17:27; John 21:1–14), his parable on fishing (Matt. 13:47–48), his provision of fish for a large group of people (Matt. 14:19 / Mark 6:41 / Luke 9:16 / John 6:11; Matt. 15:36 / Mark 8:7), his example of a child asking for a fish (Matt. 7:10 / Luke 11:11), and his eating a piece of fish following his resurrection (Luke 24:42–43).
Yet given the cock-crow within earshot of the High Priest’s house in the gospels and of the Temple in m. Yoma 1.8 and m. Sukkah 5.4, Joshua Tilton (2014) observes: “It therefore appears that the prohibition stated in 11QTc 3 I, 1–5 and m. Bab. Kam. 7:7 represents a stringent opinion that does not reflect the common practice in Jerusalem during the days of the Second Temple.” Ulrich Groetsch (2024) provides a detailed analysis of the debate among 17th-century philologists concerning the presence or absence of chickens in ancient Jerusalem as a factor in (dis)proving the reliability of the gospels.
Yet as Rives (2024: 26 n. 1 and 39 n. 35) points out, in Graeco-Roman culture sacrificial birds were “ideologically less important” than cattle, sheep, goats or pigs due to their lack of economic value; thus the women in Herodas, Mimes 4, apologize to Asclepius that they can only offer a cock rather than an ox or a sow.
Squier 2006 provides a plea to learn once again from chickens in a modernized and industrial age.
Besides Birds and Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, Aristophanes also wrote a play called Storks, which has been lost.
Cf. Elser 2024: 150 n. 22 for other ancient Jewish and Christian condemnations of the practice.
He appears as a character in Varro, De re rustica 3, which Beard (1986: 46 n. 63) describes as “his popular (almost humorous) image as the keen augur par excellence”.
As Mary Beard (1986: 34–45) notes, Cicero presents both sides of the argument and leaves the debate open-ended. The concessions the “sceptical” Cicero gives in the second volume of On Divination (Div. 2.70) are that the practice should continue “out of respect for the opinion of the masses and for its great service to the state (et ad opioniem vulgi et ad magnas utilitaties rei publicae)”. Cf. Linderski 1982.
While Julius Caesar observed that the Britons do not eat chickens (Gallic Wars 5.12.6), the Roman meal began with eggs (Horace, Satire 1.3).
It should be noted that the Romans’ use of the chicken in augury does not mean they idolized the bird, as it remained a common household “pet” with limited capacities. In Plautus, Pseudolus 1.1.29–30, for example, a scribbled letter is said to look like it was written (i.e. scratched on a wax tablet) by a chicken (gallina); see especially Clark 2002.
And thus the tables are turned on “God as Ultimate Domesticator” (Carr 2023: 591–595). On the tendency of Animal Studies to neglect domesticated (and usually female) farm animals, see Haraway 2008: 30; Steffen 2010: 124.
Indeed, early Christian commentary on this chicken-saying of the impeccable(!) Christ had to grapple with the feminine aspect of the image just as much as the animal aspect; see Doole forthcoming.
Rives (2024: 30) points out that fowl can easily be raised in “an urban setting”.
A detailed discussion of the variety of interpretations applied to this saying in patristic commentary is beyond the scope of this article, but see Doole, forthcoming.
Guillemin (2002: 256) argues that the image “implies that Jerusalem herself is a mother, albeit a ‘bad mother’ who will not allow her ‘children’ to find refuge under his [sic!] wings”. This is reading beyond the text.
Though as DeKoven (2009: 363) points out, “The term nonhuman itself is ideologically loaded: only from the point of view of the human are other animals nonhuman.” She draws comparison to the use of terms such as non-white, non-European, and non-Western.
Fraiman 2012: 110: “[M]ore often than not, the animals we encounter […] are neither canny companions nor prurient pets but the decaying corpses we euphemistically call meat.”
On the phoenix as a symbol for Christ in early Christian literature, see Spittler 2010: 347–361. For the phoenix in rabbinic texts, see Niehoff 1996.
