The savage punishment intended for the audacious rebels is abundantly
confirmed as common in Babylon by the inscriptions, which may be seen
quoted by many commentators. The narrative is exceedingly graphic. We
see the furious king, with features inflamed with passion. We hear his
hoarse, angry orders to heat the furnace seven times hotter, which he
forgot would be a mercy, as shortening the victims' agonies. We see the
swift execution of the commands, and the unresisting martyrs bound as
they stood, and dragged away by the soldiers to the near furnace, the
king following. Its shape is a matter of doubt. Probably the three were
thrown in from above, and so the soldiers were caught by the flames.

'And these three men ... fell down bound into the midst of the burning
fiery furnace' Their helplessness and desperate condition are
pathetically suggested by that picture, which might well be supposed to
be the last of them that mortal eyes would see. Down into the glowing
mass, like chips of wood into Vesuvius, they sank. The king sitting
watching, to glut his fury by the sight of their end, had some way of
looking into the core of the flames.

The story shifts its point of view with very picturesque abruptness
after verse 23. The vaunting king shall tell what he saw, and thereby
convict himself of insolent folly in challenging 'any god' to deliver
out of his hand. He alone seems to have seen the sight, which he tells
to his courtiers. The bonds were gone, and the men walking free in the
fire, as if it had been their element. Three went in bound, four walk
there at large; and the fourth is 'like a son of the gods,' by which
expression Nebuchadnezzar can have meant nothing more than he had
learned from his religion; namely, that the gods had offspring of
superhuman dignity. He calls the same person an angel in Daniel iii. 28.
He speaks there as the three would have spoken, and here as Babylonian