The Song of the Three: Prayer Inside the Furnace

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown Jewish writers. It is a prayer, a short piece of story, and a long hymn, added to the book of Daniel in its Greek translation.

When: Probably the 100s BC, perhaps from a Hebrew or Aramaic original. The hymn may be older than the rest.

Where it fits: Inside Daniel 3, between verses 23 and 24, while three young Jews of the exile stand in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. Written for a people with no Temple to worship in.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, as part of Daniel 3 (in Catholic Bibles, Daniel 3:24–90). Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha. Anglican prayer books still sing its hymn.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Its contrite heart in place of sacrifice is Psalm 51:17. Its hymn calling all creation to praise is Psalm 148, stretched out. It fills the silence in Daniel 3 while the three are in the fire.

How close it stays to me: Close in offering a humble heart instead of sacrifice.

If you only read three chapters: It is one passage of sixty-eight verses. Read verses 1 to 27, then the hymn from verse 35.

Words to Know

Azariah — one of the three young men thrown into the furnace. In Daniel he is better known by his Babylonian name, Abednego.

Hananiah and Mishael — the other two, called Shadrach and Meshach in Babylon.

Contrite — crushed, broken with sorrow for what one has done.

The Benedicite — the hymn in this book, named for its first word in Latin, Bless. It is still sung in churches.

The Book in Brief

The passage begins with the three young men walking about in the fire, praising God.

Azariah stands and prays. He blesses God and admits that his people deserve their punishment, because they sinned and did not keep the law. He asks God not to abandon them, for the sake of his name and of the promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. His people, he says, have become the least of all nations. They have no king, no prophet, no leader, no sacrifice and no place to offer one. He asks God to accept instead a broken heart and a humble spirit.

Then comes a short piece of story. The king’s servants keep feeding the furnace until the flames shoot up forty-nine cubits and burn the Babylonians standing near it. But the angel of the Lord comes down into the furnace, drives the flame out, and makes the middle of it like a cool, damp breeze, so that the fire does not touch the three.

Then all three sing a long hymn. They bless God, and then call on everything that exists to bless him: the heavens, the angels, the waters, sun and moon, stars, rain and dew, winds, fire and heat, cold and ice, nights and days, light and darkness, mountains, plants, seas, whales and fish, birds, wild and tame animals, all people, Israel, priests, servants, the souls of the righteous, the humble, and finally the three young men themselves, because God has saved them from the fire.

In Daniel 3, the king of Babylon orders everyone to bow down to a golden statue. Three young Jews refuse. They are bound and thrown into a furnace so hot it kills the soldiers who throw them in (Daniel 3:22–23).

Then, in your Bible, the very next verse is the king jumping up in astonishment: Didn’t we cast three men bound into the middle of the fire? (Daniel 3:24). He sees four men walking loose in the flames.

What happened in between? Your Bible does not say. The Greek Bible does. In the space between those two verses, it places a prayer, a few lines of story, and one of the great hymns of praise ever written.

No temple, no priest, no place

Azariah prays first. And what he says is the center of this little book.

For we, O Lord, are become less than any nation, and be kept under this day in all the world because of our sins. Neither is there at this time prince, or prophet, or leader, or burned offering, or sacrifice, or oblation, or incense, or place to offer before you, and to find mercy (Song of the Three 14–15).

No king. No prophet. No Temple. No altar. Nothing the law requires for meeting God.

Nevertheless in a contrite heart and a humble spirit let us be accepted; like as in the burnt offerings of rams and bullocks, and like as in ten thousands of fat lambs; so let our sacrifice be in your sight this day (Song of the Three 16–17).

Take our broken heart instead. Let that be our sacrifice.

When this was written, there were times when that was literally true. In 167 BC, a Greek king set up a pagan altar in the Temple in Jerusalem and banned the sacrifices. For three years there was no place to offer anything. Many scholars think this prayer, like the book of Daniel itself, was written for people living through that.¹

The words come from a psalm: The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. O God, you will not despise a broken and contrite heart (Psalm 51:17). But here they are prayed by people who had nothing else to give.

What God wants

I spent my life saying this.

I told the religious men who complained that I ate with sinners: go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’ (Matthew 9:13). When a scribe told me that loving God and loving your neighbor is more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices, I told him, You are not far from God’s Kingdom (Mark 12:33–34).

And to a Samaritan woman, at a well, who asked me where the right place to worship was, her mountain or our Temple, I said: the hour comes, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, will you worship the Father … the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth (John 4:21, 23).

Forty years after I died, the Temple was burned and never rebuilt. My people had to learn to live exactly as Azariah prayed in the furnace: with no altar, no sacrifice, only prayer, study and a humble heart. They did. Azariah’s prayer was ready for them.

Go deeperTwo Greek Daniels

The book of Daniel has a strange history in Greek. There were two translations of it.

The first, the older Greek, was part of the Septuagint, the Greek Bible made in Egypt. The second is usually credited to a man named Theodotion, who is said to have revised the Greek scriptures in the second century AD, though the version that carries his name may be older than he was. The early church came to prefer Theodotion’s Daniel, and it replaced the older one so completely that the older Greek Daniel survived in only a handful of manuscripts. Jerome, writing around 400, said the churches did not read the Septuagint’s Daniel because it was so far from the Hebrew.²

Both Greek versions contain the Song of the Three, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon, the three additions to Daniel in this volume. They do not always agree, and they place the stories differently. In Theodotion’s version Susanna usually stands at the very beginning of Daniel, before chapter 1. In the older Greek and in the Latin it comes at the end, which is why Catholic Bibles number it Daniel 13.

No Hebrew or Aramaic copy of any of the three additions has been found, at Qumran or anywhere else. But the Song of the Three reads like a translation from Hebrew, and many scholars think the prayer and the hymn were older pieces, written in Hebrew, that a later editor set inside the story of the furnace.²

Every creature, bless the Lord

Then all three sing, and they do not stop for forty verses.

O all you works of the Lord, bless you the Lord: praise and exalt him above all forever (Song of the Three 35).

And then, one by one, they call on everything. The heavens and the angels. Sun and moon and stars. Rain and dew, winds, fire and heat, frost and cold, ice and snow, nights and days, light and darkness, lightnings and clouds. The earth, the mountains, everything that grows, the springs and the seas and the rivers. O you whales, and all that move in the waters, bless you the Lord … O all you fowls of the air … O all you beasts and cattle … O you children of men, bless you the Lord (Song of the Three 57–60).

Remember where they are standing. They are in a furnace built to kill them, and they call on the fire itself to praise God. Even the thing that was meant to destroy them is part of God’s creation, and sings.

Near the end, the hymn comes to the people who count least. O you that are holy and humble of heart, bless you the Lord (Song of the Three 65). The last word goes to the humble.

Go deeperThe hymn the churches kept

This book was left out of Protestant Bibles. But its hymn never left Protestant churches.

When Thomas Cranmer put together the English Book of Common Prayer in 1549, he gave the hymn a place in Morning Prayer, where it was sung in place of the Te Deum during Lent. It has been there in Anglican prayer books ever since, under its Latin name, the Benedicite, from its first word, Bless.³ Generations of English schoolchildren and choirboys sang O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord without any idea that it came from a book their Bible had moved to the back.

In Catholic churches it is sung in the morning prayer of Sundays and feast days. In the Orthodox churches it makes up two of the nine biblical songs of the morning service, the Odes, the seventh and the eighth, and the hymns of every morning service are still built on them.³

So a book that many Christians were told was not scripture gave them one of the songs they sang most often. That happens more than you would think. The edges of the Bible have always been softer in the churches’ singing than in their lists.

The fourth man

In your Daniel, the king looks into the furnace and sees four men loose, walking in the middle of the fire … The appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods (Daniel 3:25). He does not say who it is.

The Greek fills that in too. The angel of the Lord came down into the furnace together with Azarias and his fellows … and made the midst of the furnace as it had been a moist whistling wind, so that the fire touched them not at all (Song of the Three 26–27).

Many Christians have read the fourth man as me. I will not claim that. The story says an angel. What I will tell you is that the God of this story does not watch from a distance while the faithful burn. He comes down into the fire and stands in it with them. I would want you to know God that way, whatever name you put on the fourth man.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Daniel 3:23–24 in your Bible.

You will find: the three thrown into the furnace, and then, at once, the king astonished. The Song of the Three fits in the gap.

Then read Song of the Three 14–17 beside Psalm 51:17 and Matthew 9:13.

The Short Version

• The Song of the Three is a prayer and a hymn that the Greek Bible sets inside Daniel 3, while three young men stand in the furnace.
• Azariah prays that his people have no king, no prophet, no Temple and no sacrifice, and asks God to accept a contrite heart instead.
• That is what I taught: mercy, not sacrifice, and worship in spirit and truth, not on one mountain.
• Its hymn calls every creature, even fire, to bless the Lord, and ends with the humble of heart.
• Under the name Benedicite, it is still sung in Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox churches.