Mishael

Mishael is a Hebrew personal name, generally understood to mean something like "Who is what God is?" or "Who is like God?", and it belongs in Scripture to one of the young men of Judah taken to Babylon, who is later known by the Babylonian name Meshach. The text says that he was among those selected for the king's service and that the official in charge of them gave them new names, so that Mishael is called Meshach from that point on (Daniel 1:6–7). The Hebrew name is a confession wrapped in a question; the meaning of the Babylonian name Meshach is uncertain, and scholars have proposed several Akkadian derivations without agreement.

Within the book of Daniel he appears always alongside Hananiah (Shadrach) and Azariah (Abednego). The text says Daniel made the matter of Nebuchadnezzar's dream known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah so that they would seek mercy from the God of heaven concerning the mystery (Daniel 2:17–18), and Daniel's prayer of thanks credits God with revealing deep and secret things and with changing times and seasons (Daniel 2:21–23). The narrative that fixes his place in Christian memory is Daniel 3: the three are accused of refusing to bow to the golden image, and they answer the king, "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace… But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up" (Daniel 3:17–18). The text says the furnace was heated seven times over (Daniel 3:19), that the king saw four men loose and unharmed in the fire with the fourth "like a son of the gods" (Daniel 3:25), that the fire had no power over their bodies and not even the smell of smoke clung to them (Daniel 3:27), and that Nebuchadnezzar blessed the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and decreed that no one should speak evil against him (Daniel 3:28–29).

Interpreters differ on the fourth figure. The text itself has the king describe him as "like a son of the gods" (Daniel 3:25), while Nebuchadnezzar's later words say God "has sent his angel and delivered his servants" (Daniel 3:28); one way to read the passage is to take the angel as the explanation of the fourth figure, and another is to see a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ, a reading common in older Protestant commentary but not required by the text.

Catholic and Orthodox traditions venerate the three as saints under the title of the Three Holy Youths, and the Greek form of Daniel contains an extended song placed in their mouths, the Song of the Three Young Men, which is part of the canon in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles and is excluded from Protestant canons. Protestant readers have most often taken the "but if not" of Daniel 3:18 as a model of faith that obeys without guarantee of rescue. The names themselves are sometimes allegorized in preaching, but that is interpretive suggestion rather than anything the text states.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.