Shadrach Meshach and Abednego in Furnace
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Daniel 3:28
The passage
Then Nebuchadnezzar spake, and said, Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent his angel, and delivered his servants that trusted in him, and have changed the king’s word, and yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God.
Daniel 3:28
About this plate
The furnace mouth is a great brick arch, and the three men are standing inside it. They are not writhing. One has an arm raised; the others stand close together, robed, entirely at rest. Below and around them burning brushwood throws up smoke that curls to both sides of the plate.
Above, on a terrace, the court leans over the parapet to watch — courtiers, a soldier with a spear, a round shield — and they are the ones drawn in agitation. Doré has reversed the temperatures. Everyone outside the fire is disturbed. Everyone inside it is calm.
Look into the arch behind the three. The interior is drawn as a dark shape that does not quite resolve, and it has an outline. The plate refuses to say whether that is shadow or a fourth figure, and Daniel 3:25 is what it is refusing to say — the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.
The verse on this page is Nebuchadnezzar afterwards, blessing a God he does not follow. It is a man conceding an argument, and Doré puts him up on the parapet, looking down into the one place he cannot go.
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