The Smelting-Furnace

I. The Fire With a Purpose

Whoever walked through a town in the days of the prophets could see him sitting there: the silversmith at his furnace. The bellows roar, the lead goes into the fire along with the ore to bind what is base, the earthen crucible stands in the glow; and while the silver melts, up to the top comes what never belonged in it — the scum, the dross, all that has for years passed itself off as silver. That he skims away. Scripture knows this workshop from the inside: her prophets describe the bellows and the lead, her poets weigh in it the words of God himself — pure words, silver, refined in an earthen smelting-furnace, purified sevenfold. And her poet of proverbs recorded what happens at the end: take the scum away from the silver — and out comes a vessel for the smith.1 Out of the crucible comes no lump. There comes a vessel, something with a shape and a destiny: the fire does not only take away, it yields.

Why does a chapter about persecuted teachers begin in a workshop? Because the vision itself begins there. The verse has already come up twice — in chapter 1 the end, the ticking clock; in chapter 3 the beginning, the stumbling, the darkest string. Only now the middle:

"And some of the wise shall stumble — to refine among them and to purge and to make white, until the time of the end; for it still waits for the appointed time."2

The middle of this verse is a single letter wide. In Hebrew each of the three verbs carries the little prefix that means "in order to" — the grammar of purpose. It does not say: they shall stumble, and afterward refining will be done — as though the fire were clearing up the damage. Not: they shall stumble, but despite that it will come out right. It says: they shall stumble in order to refine, in order to purge, in order to make white. The catastrophe is given a purpose clause. The sword and the flame of the previous verse, the captivity and the plunder — the whole arsenal of the persecutor stands here harnessed to a craft. What the enemy intends as destruction, God uses as furnace.

And all three verbs come out of the workshop. To refine — the smelting-word: ore into the fire until the noble separates from the false. To purge — the sifting-word: to separate, to sort out, to remove what does not belong; it is the root of the "polished arrow" from the Servant Song — burnished in the shadow of the quiver — and the verb with which the psalm weighed the prison-years of Joseph: the promise of YHWH refined him.3 To make white — the third, the strangest; at the end of this chapter it gets its own movement.

Two small words determine the direction of the fire. It says of the wise — a part stumbles, not all. And: to refine among them — the fire works within the circle, not only in the fallen member. The fall of some purifies all. So it was already in the first fulfillment: when old Eleazar walked to the rack, he said it aloud — that he was leaving the young an example; his death was no loss to the circle but instruction to the circle.4 The fire of 11:35 is no private matter between God and a martyr. It is furnace-heat that makes a whole company ready and pure.

And that this reading of the fall is no invention of later centuries can be documented outside the Bible. In the library of Qumran the War Scroll describes the final battle of the "sons of light," and in the midst of the din of war it records the same grammar of purpose: the fallen fall "through God's mysteries, in order through those mysteries to test all who are appointed for the battle," and the warriors are addressed: "take courage in God's smelting-furnace, until he moves his hand and completes his refinings" (1QM 16-17). No canonical authority and no source — Revelation nowhere quotes this scroll — but a weighed witness that the final battle itself was read in the Second Temple period as a crucible, with the fall of the righteous as an instrument of testing. The scroll comes up in full where the body is counted (chapter 6).

Here stands, then, in black and white, the law that carries this whole book and that every generation anew finds scandalous: the worst thing that befalls the wise is not the interruption of their being made ready. It is their being made ready. In chapter 3 the order of the four strings — the glory always after the other three — seemed a law of the composition. Here it turns out to be a workshop. The radiance of "shining like the stars" is not handed out to whoever happened to be left over; it is made in this fire: by heat, by separation, by a smith who knows what he is doing. The cross is not the interruption of the road to the crown. It is the road.

And the verse ends with a clock. Until the time of the end, for it still waits for the appointed time — three time-words together, precisely here, above the furnace.5 The fire has not only a purpose; it has a term. The furnace has a clock, and the smith can read it.

But what actually had to go? What was in this silver that only fire could get out? The answer stands one verse earlier — the most disquieting verse of the whole passage.

II. The Enemy at the Table

"And when they stumble, they shall be helped with a little help, and many shall join them with smooth things."6

The first half is known. When they stumble — the help comes during the fall, not after it; whoever falls is supported, not buried: the stumbling is no extermination but a descent lived through.7 And the help is little — that stands there with emphasis. Chapter 1 has shown its face: ten men and a few roots in the mountains, a village priest with bloodied hands, a lion's cub that roars — the hammer of the Maccabees, which beat back a world empire and yet is called no more than "a little help": a hand under the elbow of a stumbling people.8

Then the second half, and it begins as good news. And many shall join them. Many! The same word as in the verse before — the many whom the wise make understand. The lesson takes hold, the circle grows; every teacher knows the warmth of that moment. And then the last two words of the verse lay a cold finger on precisely that warmth: with smooth things. Flattering, slippery, eel-smooth — words you cannot stand on. Something slides into the circle along with them that presents itself as a pupil and is not one.

Smooth things is in the Hebrew Bible a rarity of the first order: four times in the whole canon — and two of those in this one chapter.9 The first time it fell thirteen verses earlier, of the contemptible one, who was not granted royal dignity but came in quietly — "and he seizes the kingship with smooth things."10 So the tyrant came to power: not by battering the gate but by having it opened. And this same word, this exact signature, now stands upon the people who join themselves to the wise. Then the cold sets in: the weapon with which the throne was seized has penetrated the circle of the faithful. Between the two stands yet a third smoothness, in a form that occurs nowhere else in the canon: the king "makes those who act wickedly against the covenant dissemble with smooth things."11 Three stations, one technique: the throne, the apostasy, the circle. The abomination did not come first with a sword. It came first with a proposal.

What that looks like from the inside the first fulfillment has shown, and it is chillingly ordinary. The men who offered Eleazar a way out on the rack — eat other meat, make a pretense, stay alive — were no torturers. They were old acquaintances, who by their own feeling meant the best for him. And the ruin of Jerusalem had begun decades earlier, not with an army but with a delegation out of Israel itself, with a reasoning that sounded reasonable — the way betrayal always sounds reasonable.12 The smoothness wears no uniform. It sits at the table, it knows your name, it praises your steadfastness — and the canon knew it long ago: of the two smelting-furnace proverbs of Scripture the one ends on "but YHWH tests the hearts" — and the other, begun word for word the same, on a man is tested by his praise.13 The praise you receive is a crucible. What comes floating to the top when many begin to praise you, that is what the fire must presently skim away.

And how deadly the smooth tongue is the first fulfillment has recorded in a single scene — it stands in the first book of Maccabees, which here speaks as close-up historiography, not as canon, and it is, well documented, the most literal fulfillment of 11:34 that the sources possess (1 Maccabees 7:12-18). Years after the abomination a new high priest enters the land, Alcimus, with a royal army under Bacchides at his back. And to those two there comes "an assembly of scribes" (συναγωγὴ γραμματέων) "to seek justice" — and the Hasidim, the faithful of the crisis, are the first among the sons of Israel to seek peace with them. Their reasoning is pious, and it sounds reasonable: a priest out of the seed of Aaron has come along with this army; he will do us no wrong. And Alcimus speaks with them "peaceable words" (λόγους εἰρηνικούς) and swears it to them. And they trust him. And he seizes sixty of them, and kills them on a single day. The book itself lays a line of a psalm beside that blood: "the flesh of your faithful and their blood they poured out around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them" (Psalm 79:2-3, cited in 1 Maccabees 7:17) — and the word of the psalm for "faithful" is chasidim: the Hasidim fell under a line that already bore their own name. Laid beside Daniel 11:34 this is no longer a parallel but a deposition. The smooth things — חֲלַקְלַקּוֹת — have received a face in history, and it bears the dearest name that language possesses: peaceable words. So the wise fall: not by the sword of a pitched battle, but by a peace they believed — sixty on a single day.

That is why the fire of 11:35 must burn, and that is why among the refining-words stands one that comes not from the heat but from the separating: to purge, to sift — ore from dross, pupil from flatterer. The refining is the answer to the previous verse: the fire does not only burn the wise one pure — it burns away what the smooth influx brought in. This is the raw truth of these two verses together: the enemy is not only outside the gate. He is at the table. And against an enemy at the table no wall and no vigilance helps — only a fire that separates what no human can separate.

III. The Smith Who Stays Seated

You might think that this fire is an emergency measure — a state of exception of the end time. The canon answers with a whole rack of tools. Everywhere God comes to his goal with people, somewhere a furnace burns; the smelting-furnace is his fixed method.

Israel has sung it as history, in the past tense of the one who has survived it: "For you have tested us, O God; you have refined us as one refines silver" — and the song enumerates what that entailed: the net, the crushing burden, people who rode over our heads, "we went through fire and through water — and you brought us out to abundance."15 Through the fire, not around it; and on the other side not ashes but abundance. In Isaiah God says it himself: "Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction."16 Chosen in the furnace. In the furnace itself the choosing is accomplished: at the bottom of the affliction, where a person thinks he has been thrown away, he is picked out. And the proverb draws the line through from the metal to the man: the smelting-furnace is for the silver and the furnace for the gold, but YHWH tests the hearts — for silver and gold there is a tool; for hearts he comes himself.17

The furnace also makes armies to measure. When Gideon lay with thirty-two thousand men over against Midian, God said — with the smelting-word: "The people are still too many; let them go down to the water, and there I will refine him for you." At the end of that sifting three hundred stood — and the reason is given with it: so that Israel might not boast against me and say, my own hand has delivered me.18 Refining as selection: the fire makes no masses, it makes vanguards — small enough to be able to ascribe nothing to themselves, pure enough to be able to carry everything. And so that no one should think the furnace is an automaton, in Jeremiah stands the report of a failed smelting, merciless as an inspection record: the bellows is scorched, the lead is consumed — in vain has the smith refined; the wicked are not sifted out. Rejected silver they are called.19 The fire can fail — not because the smith fails, but because silver can refuse to be silver. That is the gravity beneath this whole chapter.

And then the two texts in which the smelting-furnace takes its final measure — both about the days of which Daniel too speaks.

The first stands in Zechariah, and it begins with numbers you cannot read softly: "And it shall come to pass in the whole land — two thirds in it shall be cut off, shall die, and the third part shall be left in it. And I will bring the third part into the fire, and I will refine them as one refines silver, and I will test them as one tests gold." So much for the furnace. And then, without transition, the goal — no product but a conversation: "He shall call on my name, and I will answer him. I say: he is my people; and he shall say: YHWH is my God."20 The fire does not end in ashes. It ends in the mutual formula of the covenant — my people, my God — as though the whole glowing detour had but one destination: that those two sentences could be said again without remainder, from both sides.

The second stands in Malachi, on the last pages of the prophets, and it opens with the question that hangs over this whole book: "Who can endure the day of his coming, and who is the one standing when he appears?" — the one standing: the standing-word of this whole book, from the boys in the palace to the old man who shall rise to his destiny.21 "For he is like the fire of a smith, and like the lye of the washers. And he shall sit, refining and purging the silver; and he shall purge the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and like silver — and they shall bring offerings to YHWH in righteousness."22 He shall sit. Of all the words in this prophecy perhaps the tenderest. Haste needs no chair; whoever sits, stays. The Refiner is no lightning that strikes and vanishes. He sits by his furnace as the smith in every town street sat: close by, patient, with his eyes on the silver — for no one leaves precious metal alone with the fire. The fire is hot. But it is not for one second unattended.

Centuries later an apostle writes to scattered strangers in Asia Minor one sentence that sums up this movement: "Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery glow among you, which comes upon you for testing — as though something strange were happening to you."23 The word for fiery glow is in the Greek Daniel precisely the refining-word of the wise. Do not be surprised: the fire is not strange. It is the oldest tool in the hands of God — and the hand that holds it sits beside it.

IV. The Twofold Refining

And then the book of Daniel does something that occurs no second time in all of Scripture — it only stands out when you lay the verses on top of each other.

The three verbs of the smelting-furnace — to refine, to purge, to make white — stand in the whole Hebrew Bible exactly twice all three together in one verse. The first time is now known: Daniel 11:35, the fall of the wise. The second stands just before the end of the book, in the farewell at the river — the verse already sounded in chapter 2, as promise. Now it stands out for something else:

"Many shall purge themselves and make themselves white and be refined; and the wicked shall act wickedly, and none of the wicked shall understand — but the wise shall understand."24

The same three verbs. But look at the subject, for with that everything is said. In 11:35 the wise are the object: the fire is brought over them, purposefully, from outside; no one asks them whether it comes at a convenient time. In 12:10 the many are the subject — and the verb forms are reversed in direction: to purge themselves, to make themselves white; reflexive, voluntary, from within. The wise are refined. The many purge themselves.

Here a widespread misreading must be set right. Whoever reads 12:10 hastily hangs the three verbs on the wise — they are, after all, the heroes of the book — as those who are here purged, or better still: who purge the many. The ground text does not say it, and neither do the two old Greek translations: the subject of the refining-verbs is "many," and the wise appear only in the closing sentence, with a grand total of one verb. They do not purge, they are not purged, they purify no one. They understand.25 More than that the verse has not given them to do — and that is no demotion, that is the function itself, ground down to the bone: at the end of everything the wise one is the one who understands.

How do those two refinings come together — the fire over the teacher and the self-purging of the pupil? The bridge stands there already two chapters back: "the wise among the people shall make the many understand."26 Set the three verses in their order and a relay runs. The teacher goes through the fire first — refined by his fall, whether he wants to or not (11:35). What he learns there is no theory; it is knowledge with scars — he knows what the fire does, because it has been done to him, as the Servant knew the sickness he bore. That knowledge he passes on: he makes the many understand (11:33). And the many, taught, do what understanding does when it has truly arrived — they come into motion: purge themselves, make themselves white (12:10). It is the breathing of chapter 3 — receiving and passing on — but now at the deepest level: even the refining is passed on. Not as fire; no one can lay another in his furnace. As understanding.

Follow one word through the finale of the book: the many. Four times they stand in these verses, each time in a different posture. In 11:33 they are object: they are taught. In 12:10 subject: they purge themselves. In 12:3 again object: they are justified. And in 12:2 they are subject of the unimaginable: many of the sleepers in the dust awake.27 Taught — purging themselves — justified — raised: from object to subject and back, as though the text wanted to show what good teaching is: something is done to you, until you begin to do. And at the beginning of that chain, as its occasion and not as its fruit, stand the wise — the refined teachers from whom the understanding went out.

One thing even the many cannot do. To purge and to make white stand in 12:10 in the reflexive form — the third verb does not. To be refined remains passive, here too. A person can wash himself; he can make his clothes white; but into the furnace he cannot lay himself, and stoke it all the less. In both places of the canon where the three verbs come together — with the teacher and with the pupil — One and the same holds the smelting-furnace. The wise one is no smith. He is silver that can speak.

V. The White That Remains

There remains: the third verb, the strangest guest in the workshop. Refining and sifting belong to the smith — but making white? Silver gleams, it does not turn white; white is the language of linen and snow, of the washing-place. Why does the series of the smelting-furnace end in a color?

Because white in Scripture is not a color but a verdict. The verb is rare, and the three occurrences outside Daniel map the field. In Isaiah: "though your sins were as scarlet, they shall become white as snow." In David's penitential psalm: "purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."29 To make white is in the canon almost exclusively this: a defiled person who is spoken clean and washed clean — forgiveness, made visible as color. Whoever wears white in Scripture wears no taste but a sentence: acquitted.

But there exists also another white, and the canon has documented it mercilessly. In the lament over ruined Jerusalem it is said of the consecrated ones of the city: "Purer than snow were her consecrated ones, whiter than milk" — and one siege later, three lines further: "darker than soot has their form become; they are not recognized in the streets."30 That is the white of before the fire — the white of origin, of reputation, of never yet having been tested — and it did not hold: one disaster and it was soot. The white that Daniel promises stands not before the furnace but behind it. Innocence-beforehand can burn. Purity-afterward has already been through the fire; there is nothing left in it that can burn.

And this white has a future, straight through the canon. Malachi set beside the fire of the smith a second image: the lye of the washers — the Refiner is also a Washer. Centuries later, on a high mountain, three disciples see their Rabbi transfigured, and the evangelist records what happens to his clothes in the language of the washing-place: gleaming, exceedingly white, "as no washer on earth can make them white."31 No washer on earth — the white of the consummation is not produced on earth; it was only shown ahead, that day, for a moment. And at the very end of Scripture the language of this chapter returns. A multitude that no one can number, in white robes, with palm branches; and to the question who these are, the answer comes in the words of this chapter: "These are they who come out of the great tribulation" — the affliction-word of Daniel 12:1 — "and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."32 There is the reflexive movement of Daniel 12:10, word for word — the Greek verb is the same with which the Greek Daniel renders the making-white of the many. That the verb is the same stands fast; that the multitude is <em>therefore Daniel's many does not stand fast — and this house reads her otherwise.</em> The Day of the LORD (Excurs 25·2) reads the innumerable multitude as the completed Bride, on the ground of the contrast with the sealed 144,000, the "ek" of 7:14 beside the promise to Philadelphia (3:10) — a preposition that does not bear the reading but, alongside the other data, does give direction — and her place before the throne between the sixth and the seventh seal. That reading is the house position. What stands here is the echo itself: John describes the multitude in Daniel's words — and that is no accident, for the white of after-the-furnace is one white, even where it clothes two companies. The identification of the multitude with the many: disputed. And there is, in four words, also the limit of all self-purging: in the blood of the Lamb. The white is not earned in the fire; it is washed in blood that is not their own. On the far side of the furnace too the purity remains a gift — the many wash, but the Lamb has paid.

And the vanguard itself, the hundred and forty-four thousand on Mount Zion? Of them no color is named but something better — the hallmark with which every offering is approved: without blemish; "and in their mouth was found no deceit."33 Against the background of this chapter that glitters. What penetrated the circle at the stumbling? Smooth mouths. What stands on the other side of the fire, on the mountain beside the Lamb? Mouths without deceit. It is the old signature of the remnant — "in their mouth shall no deceitful tongue be found" — and of the Servant himself: no deceit in his mouth; and of Levi, the refined teacher of Malachi: no wrong found on his lips, and many he brought back from iniquity.34 This is the vessel that comes out of the fire for the smith: no supermen, no scholars, but mouths that can be trusted. The fire burns the smoothness out of the mouth. What remains is the perfect opposite of the flatterer.

So at the end of this chapter the four strings of chapter 3 come to tension — and now it is clear who tightens them, and with what. The suffering is no longer only the darkest string; it is the smelting-furnace itself, the furnace in which the vessel is made. The perseverance is the holding out as long as the furnace burns — "until the time of the end, for it still waits for the appointed time"; in Malachi it is called "the one standing at his appearing" and in Daniel "blessed is the one who waits, and arrives."35 The witness is the bridge of 11:33: the lesson that flows from the refined teacher to the self-purging many — the only export product of the furnace. And the glory is the white — in this book no end point but a starting position, for of the same purged ones it is next said: "the wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament."36 White is what remains of a person when the fire is finished. Shining is what that remainder then does, forever and ever.

Here, then, is the answer to the question with which the previous chapter closed. How does a person become like this? Not by birth, not by study, not by disposition. The wise are not born; they are forged — in a furnace that is no accident but a workshop, stoked on sword and flame, purged of the smoothness that penetrates every circle, timed to a clock that the smith can read, and tended by Someone who has gone and sat beside it and does not rise until the silver is ready. And whoever comes out of it like this — white, with a mouth without deceit and a lesson that has survived the fire — is ready for that for which all this happened: the many. What these made-ready ones then are before God and before the world, this book will yet come to see. But first it shifts the gaze: from what the fire works in a person to what God sets on him — a mark on the forehead, set before the judgment falls. Of that the next part speaks.

For whoever reads this in those days.

Perhaps you are reading this while the fire is already burning — around you, or in you. Perhaps you have lost something you held to be indispensable: your work, your name, your place at the tables where you were welcome, people you thought stood beside you. Then read this one thing: there is an "in order to" in your fire. What befalls you stands in the grammar of purpose — in order to refine, in order to purge, in order to make white. It is no chance, no punishment, and no mistake; it is a workshop, and you are not the refuse in it but the silver. And there is Someone sitting beside it. The Refiner of Scripture is no fire that leaves you alone; he sits, says the prophet — close by, patient, with his eyes on the metal, and he knows the term that has not been told to you. No furnace of his has ever been unattended, and not one second too long hot. Be vigilant, not afraid: people will join you with smooth words — that is foretold, with the same word with which the tyrant seized his throne. Do not let it break you when it happens and do not let it embitter you when it comes out; the fire in which you stand is made partly to burn away what the flattery brought in, and separating is work for the Smith, not for you. And the gentlest of all: you cannot refine yourself — no one lays himself in a furnace — but purge yourself you can; that verb God has laid in your hands. Do what the many do at the end of the book: wash your robes, and know in what blood they turn white. For this is already laid ready on the far side of your fire: the white that can no longer burn, the white of the one who is through it — and it is not going to turn gray and not going to perish; it is going to shine, like the brightness of the firmament, forever and ever. So if you are now in the furnace: it is a smith, not chance. And the white lies on the other side.