fox or jackal: the small wild dog of open country and ruins, named by one Hebrew word that never chooses between the two animals
Hebrew has one word here where English has two. It covers the true fox and the golden jackal, and probably any other small wild dog an Israelite farmer might see slipping along a wall at dusk. Ancient Hebrew did not sort animals the way a modern field guide does, so the word names a kind of creature rather than a single species, and the reader is left to judge from the scene which animal is in view.
In practice the scenes sort themselves fairly cleanly. Two things settle it: what the animal is doing, and how heavy it has to be.
- an animal light enough that its weight alone would shake down a badly built wall
- an animal that raids ripening vineyards and does damage out of all proportion to its size
- an animal that gathers where the dead lie and feeds on them
- an animal that roams a burnt city and makes its home in the rubble
The first two fit the fox; the last two fit the jackal, which runs in packs and scavenges. That is why careful translations differ from verse to verse, and why one English rendering across the whole Bible will always be wrong somewhere.
Whatever the animal, the picture the writers reach for is the same: something small, wild, and unwanted, thriving exactly where people are absent or defeated. When jackals walk on Mount Zion, the point is that nobody else does. When a lone one is said to be enough to break your wall, the point is that your wall is worthless. The ancient Greek translators of the Old Testament flattened all of this into a single Greek word for fox (ἀλώπηξ), and that is the word the New Testament inherits when Jesus calls Herod "that fox."
Nuances
Whether the three hundred animals Samson caught at Judges 15:4 are foxes or jackals.
- majorityFoxes. The episode is a folkloric tall tale about Samson as an agent of chaos, and its numbers are literary rather than zoological, so no naturalistic rescue is required.; R. G. Boling, Judges (Anchor Bible 6A; Doubleday, 1975), on 15:4-5; B. G. Webb, The Book of Judges (NICOT; Eerdmans, 2012), 383-386; D. I. Block, Judges, Ruth (NAC 6; Broadman & Holman, 1999), 439-442; J. M. Sasson, Judges 13-21 (Anchor Yale Bible 6D; Yale, 2025); S. Niditch, Judges (OTL; Westminster John Knox, 2008), 155-160
- minorityJackals. Foxes are solitary and territorial and cannot be taken in such numbers, whereas jackals travel in packs, come to bait, and are famously trappable.; H. B. Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible (London, 1867); Y. Feliks, The Animal World of the Bible (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1962), 36-37; G. F. Moore, Judges (ICC; T&T Clark, 1895), 340-343
Whether the animals the false prophets are likened to at Ezekiel 13:4 are jackals in city ruins or foxes in broken vineyard walls.
- contestedJackals. The ruins are wrecked buildings and the following verse pictures the breaches of a city wall, so the prophets are scavengers loose in the wreckage rather than builders repairing it.; D. I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1-24 (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1997), 400-402; L. C. Allen, Ezekiel 1-19 (WBC 28; Word, 1994), 201-207; M. S. Odell, Ezekiel (Smyth & Helwys, 2005); I. M. Duguid, Ezekiel (NIVAC; Zondervan, 1999), on 13:1-16
- contestedFoxes. Following Radak, the ruins are read as breaches in vineyard walls, which ties the image to the little foxes of Song of Songs 2:15.; M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (AB 22; Doubleday, 1983), 234-239; W. Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1 (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1979), 291-297; P. M. Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary (LHBOTS 482; T&T Clark, 2007)