Albert Barnes Commentary Psalms 63:10

"They shall be given over to the power of the sword: They shall be a portion for foxes." — Psalms 63:10 (ASV)

They shall fall by the sword — The margin reads, "They shall make him run out like water by the hands of the sword." The word translated in the text as “they shall fall,” and in the margin as “they shall make him run out” — נגר (nâgar) — properly means to flow or to pour out, like water. It then means to pour out, and subsequently, to give up or deliver. The idea here is that of delivering over, similar to how one pours water from a basin or pitcher: they shall be delivered over to the sword. The original word translated as “sword” is, as in the margin, “by the hands of the sword.” This means the sword is represented as accomplishing its purpose as if it had hands. The sword shall slay them.

They shall be a portion for foxes — The original word, שׁועל (shû‛âl), properly and commonly means a fox. However, under this general name "fox," people in the East seem to have included other animals that resemble a fox, particularly jackals. Thus, jackals seem to be meant in Judges 15:4, since foxes are very difficult to capture alive. In this passage also, the word has the same meaning, because foxes do not feast on dead bodies, though this is a favorite meal for the jackal. Gesenius, Lexicon. Compare Bochart Hieroz. T. ii. p. 190, ed. Lips.

Jackals are wild, fierce, and savage; they howl around dwellings at night, producing a most hideous music, beginning “in a sort of solo, a low, long-drawn wail, rising and swelling higher and higher until it quite overtops the wind,” (Thomson’s “Land and the Book,” i. 133) — and ready to gather at any moment when there is prey to be devoured. “These sinister, guilty, woebegone brutes, when pressed with hunger, gather in gangs among the graves, and yell in rage, and fight like fiends over their midnight orgies; but on the battlefield is their great carnival. Oh! let me never even dream that anyone dear to me has fallen by the sword, and lies there to be torn, and gnawed at, and dragged about by these hideous howlers.”