What Does Daniel 3:29 Mean in the King James?
Therefore I make a decree, That every people, nation, and language, which speak any thing amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The king’s confession that no god delivers like this arrives as a threat to dismember anyone who speaks against that God.
THE MEANING
The voice of power names a God who delivers and, in the same sentence, threatens bodily dismemberment and household ruin to police every people and language. The verse holds both together: the confession of deliverance does not erase the decree’s violence; it exposes authority acknowledging a power it cannot command while still wielding terror against speech.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that naming God’s power makes authority merciful: the same decree that confesses unrivaled deliverance threatens dismemberment and ruin.
THE ROOT
לְהַצָּלָה
lehatsalah
GROWS FROM
נצל
n-ṣ-l
To snatch away from danger; to rescue or deliver.
“deliver” in this verse is lehatsalah. The word presents deliverance as an actual removal from peril. Here that claim stands beside a threat to dismember bodies and ruin homes, making deliverance a direct challenge to the reach of lethal power.
ALSO GROWS
natsal: Rescue, snatch away
נָצַל
This verb gives the verse’s deliverance its concrete force: someone is taken out of danger.
hitsil: He delivered, rescued
הִצִּיל
This form describes someone actively bringing another out of danger, matching the verse’s claim that no rival god can deliver in this way.
לִשָּׁן
lishshan
GROWS FROM
לשן
l-sh-n
Tongue; by extension, speech or language.
The word names the bodily tongue as well as language, so the decree’s target is what people actually voice. Its reach across every language makes the proclamation of deliverance and the threat to speech inseparable.
ALSO GROWS
lashon: Tongue; speech; language
לָשׁוֹן
The Hebrew cognate keeps the bodily tongue visible beneath the English word “language.”
lishshanayya: Tongues; languages
לִשָּׁנַיָּא
This Aramaic plural echoes the decree’s reach across the voices of every people and nation.
THE PATTERN
A witnessed deliverance exposes the limits of human authority, even when authority answers with coercion.
He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions.Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:And when Peter was come to himself, he said, Now I know of a surety, that the Lord hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out of the hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews.THE THREAD
The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.Psalm’s “delivereth” uses the same rescue root as Daniel’s “deliver”: in both verses, deliverance means extraction from peril. The shared root makes the claim concrete beside the decree’s threat of dismemberment.
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