Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Furnace Heated Seven Times
Daniel 3:19-23
19 Then Nebuchadnezzar was full of fury, and the form of his appearance was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He spoke, and commanded that they should heat the furnace seven times more than it was usually heated. · WEB
The king's rage makes the fire hotter than it needed to be, and the extra heat kills his own soldiers before the three men reach the flames.
Then Nebuchadnezzar was full of fury, and the form of his appearance was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego Daniel 3:19.
His face changes. The narrator has kept careful track of this king's temper — furious over a dream Daniel 2:12, enraged at the accusation Daniel 3:13 — and here the fury is visible, distorting the features of a man who had a moment earlier been offering these three a way out. What he cannot tolerate is not their theology but their calm. But if not Daniel 3:18 told him that the worst he had was not enough.
He spoke, and commanded that they should heat the furnace seven times more than it was usually heated.
And rage makes him stupid. A furnace already sufficient to kill is stoked sevenfold — a proverbial way of saying past all measure, and an act with no purpose whatever. Death by fire is not made deader by more fire. The one practical effect of the order is to raise the temperature to the point where the fire kills people who are merely standing near it, and that is precisely what happens next. Cruelty in this book has a habit of exceeding its own aims and then paying for it: the men who wrote the lions' decree are eaten by the lions Daniel 6:24. Every extra degree here becomes evidence in the miracle's favor — no one afterward can suggest the flames were survivable.
He commanded certain mighty men who were in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and to cast them into the burning fiery furnace Daniel 3:20.
Soldiers, not executioners, and mighty men at that — the strongest available, for three unresisting administrators who had already declined to argue. The three are bound in their pants, their tunics, and their mantles, and their other clothes Daniel 3:21, thrown in fully dressed in the haste of a king who will not wait for the formalities. The detail is recorded for a reason; the clothes will be inspected later Daniel 3:27.
Therefore because the king's commandment was urgent and the furnace exceedingly hot, the flame of the fire killed those men who took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego Daniel 3:22.
The first casualties of the decree are the men enforcing it. The soldiers die at the mouth of the furnace; the condemned pass through it. Nothing is made of the irony — the text simply reports that the fire was lethal to everyone it touched that day except the three it was built for, which settles in advance the only natural explanation anyone could offer.
These three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down bound into the middle of the burning fiery furnace Daniel 3:23.
Fell down bound — the verse holds the worst moment still. The whole plain had fallen down at the music Daniel 3:7; these three fall at last, and it is into the fire, tied, in the one posture they had refused to take voluntarily. As far as the story has gone, obedience has cost them everything and God has done nothing. That is where the sentence ends, and it is where faith frequently has to stand. The next verse belongs to a king looking into the flames, not to the men in them.
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