For the first few decades of my preaching I ate fried chicken in lots of homes. There were numerous jokes about preachers and chicken. One was that the family of five were told by the head of the house to bow their heads while thanks was being given. Just as he was about to say Amen there was a loud cry of pain. When they looked, the preacher had five forks in his hand.
In the days before frozen meat, or even refrigeration, it was easy enough to make a last-minute decision to invite the visiting minister home without having anything prepared to eat. The woman of the house would send one of the kids to the yard to select a plump fryer. It did not take very long to get that chicken plucked, cut, rolled in flour and fried. It was good.
When I opened the digital headlines from The Jerusalem Post (here) this morning I read an article reporting that chickens were first commercialized in Israel 2,300 years ago. A little later in the day I received reports from Joseph Lauer. First the NPR report (here), and then other sources.
To summarize. Researchers at the University of Haifa have been studying more than a thousand chicken bones excavated at Maresha (= Mareshah), a site in the Shephelah of Israel, from the Hellenistic period (400 to 200 B.C.). Lee Perry-Gal is quoted by NPR:
“The site is located on a trade route between Jerusalem and Egypt,” says Lee Perry-Gal, a doctoral student in the department of archaeology at the University of Haifa. As a result, it was a meeting place of cultures, “like New York City.”
Lee Perry-Gal examining chicken bones from Hellenistic Maresha.
Another photo provided by the folks at Haifa shows chicken bones in an ancient cooking pot.
Cooking pot with chicken wing bones from the excavation.
If you have more technical interest in this story you should see the abstract on the PNAS website here. The article may be downloaded for a fee.
When I began to look at Biblical references to chickens, I was a little surprised at the paucity of references in the Old Testament
There is only one reference to the rooster in the Old Testament (Proverbs 30:31), but the New Testament contains at least a dozen references. Most of them are about Peter’s denial of Jesus.
A rooster at the Greek Orthodox property at Capernaum. Photo by Ferrell Jenkins.
Jesus says He wanted to gather the children (used of all the people) of Jerusalem together “the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matthew 23:37; cf. Luke 13:34 NAU).
If there was no widespread production of chickens in Israel until the Hellenistic period, what did the prophets eat?
Ferrell's Travel Blog 
A friend of mine once told me that when he was a boy growing up in North Alabama, and the preacher came to visit, all the chickens would run under the house.