What Do Dogs Symbolize in the Bible? Scavengers, Insults and a Few Good Dogs

In the Bible, dogs are mostly street scavengers, so calling someone a dog is an insult, and dogs stand for enemies, the unclean and false teachers. Scripture also knows sheepdogs, the little dogs under a family’s table and the dog that walked with Tobias. It never calls the dog man’s best friend, and it gives dreams about dogs no meaning.

The dog’s place in Scripture is about as low as a place can be. Yet one of the most moving scenes in the Gospels happens right there. A mother begs Jesus to heal her daughter, hears herself compared to a dog, and answers, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” (Matthew 15:27). She takes the lowest place and finds grace waiting in it. The crumbs under the table run through more of these stories than you might expect.

The Hebrew word is keleb and the Greek is kyon, and both name the ordinary dog of the town and the field. Most dogs in the Old Testament are not pets. They “go round about the city” at evening (Psalm 59:6), and the law of Moses sends meat torn by wild beasts their way: “ye shall cast it to the dogs” (Exodus 22:31). Dogs lived on what people threw out, and so the dog came to stand for anything low, unclean or dangerous.

How many times are dogs mentioned in the Bible?

The King James Version says “dog”, “dogs” or “dog’s” 43 times, in 40 verses: 31 in the Old Testament and 9 in the New. Most of them are hard words. The book of Tobit, which stands in the Old Testament of Catholic Bibles, adds a dog that follows Tobias on his journey and runs home ahead of him. Here is every passage, grouped by what the dog stands for, so you can look each one up in your own Bible:

Why is “dog” an insult in the Bible?

Because there was hardly anything lower to be compared with. When David came out against him, Goliath saw only “a youth” and took it as an insult: “Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?” (1 Samuel 17:43). Abner, accused by Saul’s son of taking Saul’s concubine, flared up: “Am I a dog’s head,” as though Saul’s son were treating him as worthless (2 Samuel 3:8).

A dead dog was lower still, and people used the phrase of themselves to show how small they were. David, hunted by King Saul, asked, “after whom dost thou pursue? after a dead dog, after a flea” (1 Samuel 24:14). When Shimei cursed David and threw stones at him, David’s officer Abishai threw the phrase back as an insult: “Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king?” (2 Samuel 16:9).

The tenderest use belongs to Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s lame son. David had just promised him a place at the king’s own table, and Mephibosheth bowed and said, “What is thy servant, that thou shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?” (2 Samuel 9:8). He called himself a dead dog, and the king gave him a seat at his table. It is the Canaanite woman’s story, told long before.

Who are the “dogs” in the Bible?

When Scripture calls people dogs, it means one of three kinds: enemies who close in, leaders and teachers who fail their people, and those who stay outside God’s holy city.

Enemies who close in

In Psalm 22 the sufferer cries, “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me,” and prays, “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog” (Psalm 22:16, 20). Augustine read the psalm as spoken by Christ on the cross. In his commentary he heard the dogs as a crowd “barking, not for truth, but for custom,” and took the prayer of verse 20 as Christ praying for his Church: “from the power of the people, barking after their custom, deliver My Church.” Psalm 59 pictures enemies the same way: at evening “they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city” (Psalm 59:6).

Leaders and teachers who fail

A watchdog that sleeps is no use to anyone, and Isaiah turns that picture on Israel’s leaders: “His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough” (Isaiah 56:10–11). Paul uses the word for teachers he wanted the church at Philippi to keep away from: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision” (Philippians 3:2).

Those outside the holy city

The last chapter of the Bible names who stays outside the gates of the new Jerusalem: “For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie” (Revelation 22:15). Thayer’s Greek lexicon reads “dogs” there as people of impure mind. Some readers take it more narrowly, as a word for male prostitutes, which Thayer judges “less probably” right.

That narrower reading comes from the law of Moses. “Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow” (Deuteronomy 23:18). The verse before it bans the “whore” and the “sodomite”, which the commentators Keil and Delitzsch explain as women and men who sold themselves in the worship of the Canaanite goddess Astarte. They read “the price of a dog” as “a figurative expression used to denote the gains of the kadesh,” the male prostitute, not the price of an animal. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon also notes that “dog” was a name given to male temple prostitutes.

Why did dogs eat Jezebel?

Because God had said they would, as a judgment on the house of Ahab. To lie unburied where dogs and birds could reach the body was a shameful end, and the prophets used it as a sentence. Ahijah told the wife of King Jeroboam, “Him that dieth of Jeroboam in the city shall the dogs eat; and him that dieth in the field shall the fowls of the air eat” (1 Kings 14:11).

Jezebel had Naboth stoned on false charges so that Ahab could take his vineyard. Elijah gave Ahab the same sentence: “In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine,” and “The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel” (1 Kings 21:19, 23). Ahab died of an arrow wound in battle against the Syrians, and when his chariot was washed, “the dogs licked up his blood” (1 Kings 22:38). Later, at Jehu’s order, Jezebel was thrown from a window at Jezreel. Jehu’s men went to bury her and found almost nothing left, and Jehu remembered the word “spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel” (2 Kings 9:36). It is a grim story. Innocent blood had been shed for a vineyard, and God did not forget it.

Which Bible proverbs mention dogs?

Four sayings use dogs. Two turn on a dog’s habits, one on its low place, and the fourth may not be about a dog at all.

• The dog and its vomit. “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11). Peter applies the same “true proverb” to people who knew “the way of righteousness” and went back to their old life: “The dog is turned to his own vomit again” (2 Peter 2:21–22).
• A dog by the ears. “He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears” (Proverbs 26:17). Grab a dog by the ears and it will bite. Step into someone else’s quarrel and you will get hurt the same way.
• The living dog. “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9:4). The lowly dog alive outranks the king of beasts dead.
• The greyhound. The King James Version names “A greyhound” among four things that walk proudly (Proverbs 30:31). The Hebrew word occurs only there and its meaning is uncertain. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon says it means “girded” and lists greyhound, war-horse and rooster as guesses, so the verse may not be about a dog at all.

What did Jesus say about dogs?

Jesus mentions dogs three times. In the Sermon on the Mount he says, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you” (Matthew 7:6). The dogs and pigs stand for people who would treat holy things with contempt. The saying is about care with what is sacred, not about animals.

The longest passage is the Canaanite woman, in the region of Tyre and Sidon, whose daughter was “grievously vexed with a devil.” At first Jesus gave her no answer. When his disciples asked him to send her away, he said, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She knelt and said, “Lord, help me,” and he answered, “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” The children are Israel, to whom he was first sent, and the dogs are those outside. As John Chrysostom put it, Jesus “calls them no longer sheep, but children, and her a dog.” She did not argue with the picture. She accepted it and asked for the crumbs: “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” And Jesus answered, “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt,” and “her daughter was made whole from that very hour” (Matthew 15:22–28). In Mark she says “the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28).

The word Jesus uses here is not the ordinary Greek word for dog. It is kynarion, which Thayer’s lexicon defines as “a little dog,” and it comes in the New Testament only in this conversation. The small form points to household dogs, the kind that wait under a table. What the story is about is her faith. Chrysostom, in the same homily, marvelled at her humility: “she calls herself a dog, and them masters; so for this she became a child.”

The third mention is in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The beggar lay at the rich man’s gate, “full of sores, And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores” (Luke 16:20–21). Jesus says nothing more about the dogs. Lazarus longed for the crumbs from the table, the very place the dogs ate, and the only company the story gives him is the dogs.

Does dreaming about dogs have a biblical meaning?

The Bible gives it no meaning, whether the dogs in the dream are friendly, fierce or attacking. Scripture has no dream dictionary. The dreams it explains were sent by God for a purpose in the story, and their meaning came from God too. Joseph asked, “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8), and Daniel told the king that no wise man could reveal his dream, “But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:28).

A dream of dogs attacking can still leave you shaken. You can bring that fear to God in the psalm’s own words: “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety” (Psalm 4:8). The same holds for dreams about wolves.

Does the Bible say a dog is man’s best friend?

No. The phrase is not in the Bible, and no verse praises a dog’s loyalty. But a few dogs in Scripture are simply dogs doing a dog’s work, even if they still rank low.

Job had sheepdogs. In his misery he complains of young men who mock him, “whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock” (Job 30:1). On the night of the last plague in Egypt, God promised that “against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue” (Exodus 11:7). Jewish tradition remembered those quiet dogs. The Jewish commentator Rashi, drawing on an older rabbinic commentary, explains that the law gives torn meat to the dogs (Exodus 22:31) because “the Holy One, blessed is He, does not withhold the reward of any creature,” and he quotes God as saying of the dog, “Give it its reward.”

Scripture’s care for animals reaches dogs too: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast” (Proverbs 12:10). Cruelty to animals is a sin even where using them is not, as the Bible’s view of killing animals explains. If you have lost a dog you loved, Scripture does not say whether animals go to heaven, and Christians answer differently; what the churches teach about cats in heaven applies to dogs as well.

The warmest dog in Scripture is in the book of Tobit. Tobit is part of the Catholic Old Testament (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 120). The Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles list “The Book of Tobias” among the books the Church reads “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.” In Bibles like the New Revised Standard Version, the two verses that tell of the dog are numbered 6:2 and 11:4. When young Tobias set out with the angel Raphael, “the dog followed him” (Tobit 6:1, Douay-Rheims). And on the long road home, as his blind father waited, “the dog, which had been with them in the way, ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail” (Tobit 11:9).

Related reading

• 18 Bible Verses About Dogs
• Prayers for a Pet That Has Died: Thanks, Guilt, Grief and a Goodbye
• What Do Foxes Symbolize in the Bible? Cunning, Destruction and Ruin
• What Do Snakes Symbolize in the Bible?
• Dreaming About Dead Animals: The Bible Gives It No Meaning