The Angel That Slapped a King for Naming the Fourth a Son of God

The fire roared forty-nine cubits above the mouth of the oven, and Nebuchadnezzar leaned toward it like a man leaning over the edge of a well. His servants had fed the blaze naphtha and pitch and dry brushwood until it lashed sideways and swallowed the Chaldeans who had lit it. Four nations died in that heat. The king did not flinch. He had thrown three young men of Judah into that furnace bound in their cloaks and trousers and hats, and he had come to watch them burn.

They were not burning.

The Three Who Walked in the Coals

Bound, they had gone down into the center of the fire. There Azariah opened his mouth, and what came out was not a scream. "Blessed are You, Lord, God of our fathers, and Your name is glorified forever," he prayed. He did not protest that his people had been wronged. He confessed. "Everything that has fallen on us and on Jerusalem is true judgment, because we sinned and turned away from You." The Temple was gone. The altar was gone. He had no prince, no prophet, no sacrifice left to bring. So he offered the only thing the fire had not taken. "Let our crushed spirit count before You like rams and bullocks on the altar."

Above the oven the angels of heaven crowded forward. Three righteous men in the flames, and not one of them had moved to save himself. The angels wanted to swoop down and pull them out. God stopped them at the edge of the sky. "Did they do this for your sakes?" He asked. "No. They did it for Me. I will save them with My own hands."

Gabriel Walks Into the Oven

Yurkami, the angel of hail, stepped forward and offered to put the fire out with cold. Gabriel, the angel of fire, waved him off. Hail would be too quiet a thing, he said. The wicked deserved a sharper answer. So Gabriel went down into the furnace himself and split the heat in two. Outside the oven he let the flames climb higher, until the men who trusted in their own cruelty cooked where they stood. Inside, at the very heart of the coals, he turned the air to a cool and moist breeze, a soft whistling wind moving over the three as if it were morning in a garden. Their hair did not singe. The smell of smoke did not touch their cloaks. They rose to their feet and began to sing.

And the ropes that had bound them fell away into the fire and lay there glowing, while the three walked loose among the coals.

The King Counts the Figures in the Fire

Nebuchadnezzar rose from his seat. He had ordered three men thrown in. He counted again. He counted a fourth.

"Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?" he said to his counselors, and they answered that it was so. The king pointed into the blaze with a shaking hand. "Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt." Then his voice climbed, higher and higher, past what any mouth should reach. "And the form of the fourth," he cried, "is like a son of God."

The word left him. It hung over the furnace.

The Hand From Heaven

At that hour an angel came down out of heaven and struck the king across the face.

The blow staggered him. The angel stood over him and did not soften it. "Wicked one," the angel said. "Putrid drop. Retract your words." The king, who an hour before had counted himself lord of all the earth, stood with his cheek stinging and his mouth still open around the thing he had said. The angel leaned closer. "And does He have a son?"

Nebuchadnezzar understood that he had lifted his tongue too high. He had stood at the edge of a fire that burned four nations and could not touch three boys, and he had reached for the one word that was not his to speak. The slap taught him whose mouth that word did not fit.

So he corrected himself in front of his whole court. "Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego," he said, "who sent His angel and delivered His servants who trusted in Him." He did not say son. He had been struck out of that word. He said angel, and he said servant, and he kept his eyes low.

The One Who Came Down

The three walked out of the oven, and the smell of fire was not on them. Behind them the coals settled. The fourth figure, the one the king had named wrongly and then renamed, was no son. Rabbi Reuven said simply that he was an attendant of God's own, a servant sent down into the heat to keep three servants company, the same Gabriel who had turned the coals to a whistling wind. He had come to cool a fire. On his way out he had cooled a king as well, with the flat of a heavenly hand.