Three Youths Told Nebuchadnezzar That a Dog Was His Equal in Worship

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The Valley Where Everyone Bowed

The horns went off across the plain and the whole valley folded at once. Satraps, treasurers, judges, the men who counted grain for provinces, all of them down in the dust with their foreheads on the ground in front of a gold figure taller than the trees.

Three men stayed standing. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah had been carried out of Judah as boys and given Babylonian names at the palace door, and now they stood in a field of bent backs where anyone with eyes could count them.

The guards did not have to hunt for them. They only had to look for the vertical.

The King Had a Verse Ready

Nebuchadnezzar did not open with the furnace. He opened with an argument, which was worse.

Is it true, he said, using the court names he had hung on them. Yesterday, when a man anywhere in the world wanted an idol worth having, where did he go? To Jerusalem. Your city sold the nations their gods. Now you come here to sneer at mine?

Then he reached for their own scriptures, and his hand did not shake. Did your God not tell you to obey the kingdom in everything the kingdom says? Keep the king's command. Your Solomon wrote that. I am the king.

It was the trap in the room. Not the fire. The fire was only heat, and heat kills a body once. The verse was aimed at the part of them that had crossed a desert in chains and still believed the words they had carried were on their side.

Taxes Yes, Knees No

They did not spend long on it.

You are king over us, they said, for the tax and for the levy on the land. Take both. Count them and take them. But when it comes to worship, Nebuchadnezzar and a dog are equal.

The court heard a king set beside a street animal and priced at the same figure. It was not an insult thrown in temper. It was a survey line. Everything on one side of it belonged to Babylon and they would hand it over without argument. Nothing on the other side was for sale, and the man on the throne had no more claim there than something scavenging in an alley.

Solomon had written a second line that the king had not quoted. Fear the LORD, my son, and the king, in that order, first and second, and never the second where the first has already spoken. Rabbi Isaac bar Eleazar of Caesarea put it as a pair of garments. What wisdom wears as a crown on the head, humility wears as a sandal on the foot, and the fear of heaven is both at once, the top of the one and the sole of the other.

We have no answer to give you in this matter, they told him. Our God can pull us out of your furnace. And if He does not, know this and write it down. We will not serve your gods.

The Priest Who Had Sent Them There

A priest had put them in that valley, though he never saw it.

Jeremiah came from the priestly houses of Anathoth, and the priest's work is to walk up to a diseased body, look at the sore, and say aloud what it is. He looked at Israel and pronounced the plague healed, and the healing he pronounced was Babylon. He emptied the city into the hands of the man who now owned these three. Purification of that kind does not feel like mercy while it is happening. It feels like being scoured.

The priest's rite calls for cedar wood, a thread of crimson, and hyssop, and for the whole bundle to go into the burning. Three young men went where the bundle goes.

They heated the mouth of the furnace until the soldiers who carried them up the ramp died on the ramp.

Clean Water, Later

Out of that heat came a promise that had nothing to do with the king listening downstairs.

In this world, God told them, your sins bring you suffering, and the suffering scrubs you clean, and then you sin and it starts again, furnace after furnace with no end to the cycle. In the world coming, no priest will do it and no exile will do it and no fire will do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you Myself, and you will be clean.

Nothing about that promise saved them from the floor they were walking on. It only told them what the floor was for.

As for the men who taught that two powers run the world and that a person may bow to one of them and stay whole, the prophet had already counted them out. Two parts of the earth cut off and gone. A third left standing. The third is Israel, who fears the LORD, and the king, and knows which is which.

In the valley the gold figure was still upright. So, when the door opened, were the three of them.