Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego

Chapter 98 begins, “Already has it been related how the great Leviathan (see entry 117) is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire…” DANIEL 3:1-30 recalls how, some 2,600 years ago, three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were ordered by king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon to be bound and cast into a “burning fiery furnace” that had been heated to “seven times more than it was usually heated” for refusing to serve his gods or worship a gold image he had set up. After having the three men thrown in, and the intense flame killing the men who threw them in, king Nebuchadnezzar asks his counselors, “Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said to the king, “True, O king.” “Look!” he answered, “I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” When the three men emerged, “the hair of their head was not singed nor were their garments affected, and the smell of fire was not on them.” King Nebuchadnezzar then rightly declared that “there is no other God who can deliver like this.”