Daniel 3:23-25

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Daniel 3:23 tn Aram “into the midst of the furnace.” For stylistic reasons the words “the midst of” have been left untranslated.
2. Daniel 3:23 sn The deuterocanonical writings known as The Prayer of Azariah and The Song of the Three present at this point a confession and petition for God’s forgiveness and a celebration of God’s grace for the three Jewish youths in the fiery furnace. Though not found in the Hebrew/Aramaic text of Daniel, these compositions do appear in the ancient Greek versions.
3. Daniel 3:24 tn Aram “we threw…bound.”
4. Daniel 3:24 tn Aram “into the midst of.”
5. Daniel 3:25 sn The phrase like that of a god is in Aramaic “like that of a son of the gods.” Many patristic writers understood this phrase in a christological sense (i.e., “the Son of God”). But it should be remembered that these are words spoken by a pagan who is seeking to explain things from his own polytheistic frame of reference; for him the phrase “like a son of the gods” is equivalent to “like a divine being.” Despite the king’s description though, the fourth person probably was an angel who had come to deliver the three men, or was a theophany.