For the Chief Musician. On an instrument of Gath. A Psalm by the sons of Korah.
1How lovely are your dwellings,
Yahweh of Armies!
2My soul longs, and even faints for the courts of Yahweh.
My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
3Yes, the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young,
near your altars, Yahweh of Armies, my King, and my God.
4Blessed are those who dwell in your house.
They are always praising you. Selah.
5Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
who have set their hearts on a pilgrimage.
6Passing through the valley of Weeping, they make it a place of springs.
Yes, the autumn rain covers it with blessings.
7They go from strength to strength.
Every one of them appears before God in Zion.
8Yahweh, God of Armies, hear my prayer.
Listen, God of Jacob. Selah.
9Behold, God our shield,
look at the face of your anointed.
10For a day in your courts is better than a thousand.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,
than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.
11For Yahweh God is a sun and a shield.
Yahweh will give grace and glory.
He withholds no good thing from those who walk blamelessly.
12Yahweh of Armies,
blessed is the man who trusts in you.
Nebuchadnezzar referred to the fourth person as an “angel.” This fourth person in the furnace may have been a Christophany or a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ.
Psalms 22 says the fathers of the Jews trusted in God and were delivered; Psalms 84 and Jeremiah 17 proclaim that blessed is the man who trusts in God.
Nebuchadnezzar, like Darius I after him (in Ezra 6), issued a decree of dreadful punishments for those who dared to interfere with honoring Yahweh.
Nowhere does Daniel say what the statue's image represents. It may have been of Nebuchadnezzar, Marduk, Babylon’s chief god, or merely an obelisk intended, as was the statue that Paul saw in First Century Athens, to honor an unknown god.
If the statue depicted a human, it must have been highly stylized and elongated because it was 60 x 6 cubits. Since a cubit is 18 inches, that would be 90 feet high by nine feet wide (in diameter). It was ten times taller than it was wide; it was about the height of a nine-story building or 15 times taller than a 6-foot man.
If the basic design of the statue were a solid cylinder, it would have contained 12.5 million kilograms of gold, with a valuation in 2025 of $825 billion. If the basic design of the statue were a cone, it would have contained 4.2 million kilograms of gold, with a valuation in 2025 of $373 billion. Even if the statue were only gold plated, while we cannot know the thickness of the plating, obviously the value of the gold would have been many millions or even billions of today’s dollars.
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Chapter 2 thus accurately depicted Babylon as an Empire of Gold. Such a concentration of wealth was unknown in the Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires, even if the total wealth of those empires may have been greater.
One wonders what Nebuchadnezzar did with the statue after this event. Perhaps he left it standing as a witness to the miracle. Or perhaps, before the fiery furnace cooled, he melted it down to gold bars. This seems more likely. An absolute despot probably would not have relished people passing by the statue and snickering at the king’s vast and expensive idol that failed to serve as a focus of universal worship (Ps 22: 4-5; 84:12; Jer 17:7; Ezra 6:11).