What Do Foxes Symbolize in the Bible? Cunning, Destruction and Ruin

In the Bible, foxes stand for cunning, destructive people and for places left in ruins. They appear in nine verses of the King James Version, and none is a good sign. Jesus called Herod “that fox,” Ezekiel compared false prophets to foxes, and foxes walk over the ruins of Zion. No one in Scripture dreams of a fox.

A fox makes its home where people have given up. Again and again the Bible sees it there: on the empty hill of Zion, in the gaps of a broken town, testing a wall built too weakly to stand. And once Jesus used it the other way round. The fox, he said, has a den to go back to. He had none.

Every fox in the Bible

The Hebrew word is shu’al, and in the New Testament the Greek is alopex. Six Old Testament verses use the first and three New Testament verses the second.

Is the fox ever a good sign in the Bible?

No. Scripture never praises the fox, and never makes one a picture of God or of his people. Yet the animal was everywhere in the land. A town in the far south of Judah, Hazarshual (Joshua 15:28), carries shu’al in its name. Because everyone knew foxes, a writer could reach for one and be understood at once: a sly man, damage done a little at a time, or wild animals moving into places people had left.

What are the little foxes that spoil the vines?

They are pests in a love poem, and the poem is worth hearing before anyone draws a moral from it. In the Song of Solomon the beloved calls the woman he loves to come away, “for, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone,” and “the vines with the tender grape give a good smell” (Song of Solomon 2:11, 13). Then comes the line people remember: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes” (Song of Solomon 2:15).

The Hebrew behind “tender grapes” means the blossom of the vine, the first flowering of spring. And in the Song a vineyard can be the woman herself. Early on she says, “mine own vineyard have I not kept” (Song of Solomon 1:6), and near the end comes the line “My vineyard, which is mine, is before me” (Song of Solomon 8:12). So the plea is to guard young love in flower from whatever would spoil it before it bears fruit. Barnes’ Notes hears in it “what appears to be a fragment of a vine-dresser’s ballad,” a hint at the vineyards she was made to keep (Song of Solomon 1:6). A vine in blossom is easy to harm.

Do the little foxes mean small sins?

The verse names no sin, but the reading is an old one. Christian preachers have long heard the little foxes as small faults, or as false teaching that does its harm before anyone notices. Ellicott’s commentary notes that “in the allegorising commentators they stand for heretics.” Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary turns the verse inward: “The first risings of sinful thoughts and desires, the beginnings of trifling pursuits which waste the time,” and “small departures from truth,” are among the “little foxes which must be removed.”

So a sermon on the small sins that spoil a marriage or a faith uses the verse well, as long as everyone knows it is a lesson drawn from the picture. The poem itself cares about a vineyard in blossom and two people in love, and about keeping both safe while they are young and tender.

Why did Jesus call Herod a fox?

Some Pharisees came to Jesus with a warning: “Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee.” He answered, “Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected” (Luke 13:31–32). This was Herod Antipas, “tetrarch of Galilee” (Luke 3:1), the ruler who had said, “John have I beheaded” (Luke 9:9). Jesus knew whom he was naming.

The word can be heard two ways. The first is cunning. Barnes’ Notes says that “a fox is an emblem of slyness, of cunning, and of artful mischief,” and takes Jesus to mean Herod’s scheme to scare him out of his territory through messengers who pretended to be friends.

The second is smallness. In Jewish speech the fox was the lesser animal set beside the lion. The Mishnah keeps the saying “be a tail to lions rather than a head to foxes” (Pirkei Avot 4), with the same Hebrew word, shu’al. John Gill cited that saying on this verse and noted that “the word is used with the Jews, for a vain and empty man.” Heard this way, Jesus treated Herod as a petty ruler whose threats could not change God’s timetable.

The two fit together: a crafty man of no real weight. The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges calls it “the only word of unmitigated contempt (as distinguished from rebuke and scorn)” recorded among the sayings of Christ. Then Jesus went on with his work: “Nevertheless I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem” (Luke 13:33). A fox could not hurry him.

What is the prophecy of the foxes in Ezekiel 13?

It is God’s charge against false prophets. Ezekiel was told to speak “against the prophets of Israel that prophesy… out of their own hearts,” and to say: “Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts” (Ezekiel 13:2–4). The Hebrew puts the foxes among ruins, and one modern translation, the Berean Standard Bible, reads “like foxes among the ruins.”

The next verse tells us why: “Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the Lord” (Ezekiel 13:5). A fox lives in the broken places of a fallen town and has no interest in mending them. These prophets were the same. They settled into Israel’s ruins and repaired nothing, speaking for God without having heard from him.

Why are foxes a sign of ruin and judgment?

Because they take over what people leave behind. After Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, its mourners wrote: “For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim. Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it” (Lamentations 5:17–18). The holy hill of Jerusalem had become ground for wild animals. The mourners do not soften it. They look at the hill and say what they see.

The psalmist turns the same picture on his enemies: “But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes” (Psalm 63:9–10). To lie unburied, food for scavengers, was the end of the defeated.

What did Tobiah mean about a fox and the wall?

He was mocking the Jews who were rebuilding Jerusalem. While Nehemiah’s builders worked, Sanballat jeered at them before the army of Samaria, and “Tobiah the Ammonite was by him, and he said, Even that which they build, if a fox go up, he shall even break down their stone wall” (Nehemiah 4:3). The joke was that the wall was so weak a light animal could knock it over. The wall held. Nehemiah records that it “was finished in the twenty and fifth day of the month Elul, in fifty and two days” (Nehemiah 6:15). After the ruins where foxes walk, here is a wall no fox would break.

Why did Samson tie foxes’ tails together?

To burn the Philistines’ harvest. When Samson’s father-in-law gave his wife to another man, Samson “went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives” (Judges 15:4–5). The Philistines took their revenge on his wife’s family (Judges 15:6), and the feud grew from there.

These foxes are real animals with no hidden meaning. Samson used them as a weapon in a private quarrel that became a war.

Were the Bible’s foxes really jackals?

Some may have been. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon defines shu’al as “fox, perhaps also jackal.” It suggests jackal for Samson’s animals because of how many were caught, and lists the verses where the animal haunts ruins (Ezekiel 13:4; Lamentations 5:18) and eats the dead (Psalm 63:10). The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia notes that people of the region “do not always distinguish the fox and jackal,” and that jackals are “probably more numerous than foxes,” though it adds that reading jackals “does not appreciably diminish the difficulties” of explaining the story. The Revised Version put “jackals” in its margin at Judges 15:4.

The meaning hardly changes. Fox or jackal, it is a wild, dog-like animal that raids crops and moves in where people have moved out.

What does it mean to dream of a fox, according to the Bible?

The Bible gives it no meaning. No one in Scripture dreams of a fox, and the Bible offers no dictionary of dream symbols. The dreams it does interpret, such as those Joseph and Daniel explained, are presented as coming from God. Joseph asked two men who had dreamed, “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8), and Daniel told King Nebuchadnezzar that his wise men could not explain his dream, “But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (Daniel 2:27–28).

Scripture knows the ordinary dream too: “a dream cometh through the multitude of business” (Ecclesiastes 5:3). A fox in your dream may come from a fox you saw on the road, a story, or a worry about someone sly. The same holds for a fox seen at night or crossing your path; the Bible attaches no message to it. Other animal dreams get the same answer, as with dreaming about wolves and dreaming about dead animals.

What did Jesus mean when he said foxes have holes?

He meant that following him would cost a settled home. A scribe told Jesus, “Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest,” and Jesus answered, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8:19–20). Luke tells the same exchange as Jesus sets out for Jerusalem (Luke 9:51, 57–58). Here the fox is no villain. It is an ordinary animal with a den to go back to, and the Son of Man has less than that.

Augustine, preaching on the passage, heard a second layer and took the foxes and birds as the man’s own heart: “in you, guile like the fox does dwell, and pride as the birds of heaven.” That is a preacher’s reading. The plain sense is the cost of following Jesus, told to a man who offered to follow him before he had counted it. In Lamentations and Ezekiel the fox makes its home in ruins. Here it simply has a home, and the one who speaks of it is on the road to Jerusalem with nowhere to lay his head.

Related reading

• What do snakes symbolize in the Bible?
• What do dogs symbolize in the Bible?
• What does a lion symbolize in the Bible?
• Bible verses about animals
• Bible verses about dreams