Daniel 1:7
And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.
Tag: My Identity is in Christ
The world wants to identify who we are, or should be. The world puts out images of what we should look like. The world tries to shape our being and influence our thinking of what our body types should be; what our hairstyle should look like; what success looks like. They are, in essence, trying to do what the Babylonians tried to do with the Hebrew slaves: Change their identity. In the above passage we see that one of the first things they did was change the names of these four Hebrew boys. Note what one commentator says about this "re-naming" issue:
(World Biblical Commentary)
Like most OT names, all three are theophoric. In other words, each has a divine element in it: either “El” (-el), which means “God,” or “Yah” (-iah), which is an abbreviated form of “Yahweh,” the proper name of Israel’s deity. Daniel means “El is my judge”; Hananiah, “Yahweh is gracious”; Mishael, “Who is what El is?”; and Azariah, “Yahweh has helped.” The chief official changed their names to Babylonian ones (1:7) since they were now servants of the Babylonian king. Daniel became Belteshazzar, which probably means “protect his life.” The Akkadian forms and meanings of Shadrach and Meshach are not clear. Perhaps they were deliberately obscured by the biblical writer because they contained the names of pagan gods. Abednego may be a corruption of abed-nabu, meaning “servant of [the god] Nabu.” Just as there is no struggle recorded over the curriculum, so there is no objection raised about their names, even though they may be pagan.
If the names themselves are not transparent, the significance of the naming is. It shows the dominance of the Babylonians over the Jews. Only one in power may rename another. Adam gave names to the animals, demonstrating that he had dominion over them (Gen. 2:20). God, the divine sovereign, sometimes changed the names of people: Abram to Abraham (Gen. 17:5), Sarai to Sarah (Gen. 17:15), and Jacob to Israel (Gen. 32:28). Also, human kings show their sovereignty in this way. Pharaoh Neco not only decided to replace King Jehoahaz with Eliakim, but he also changed his name to Jehoiakim (2 Kgs. 23:34). Similarly, Nebuchadnezzar put Mattaniah on the Judean throne when he took Jehoiachin into exile, and he changed Mattaniah’s name to Zedekiah (2 Kgs. 24:17). A closer parallel to Daniel is Joseph, whose name was changed by Pharaoh to Zaphenath-Paneah when he came into royal service (Gen. 41:45).
The world wants us to conform to their image just as in this story. So, God can and does not want that for us. In Romans 12:1-2 we are told to NOT conform to the image of this world. That was the challenge for Daniel and his three friends. They served God and, even though renamed by the Babylonians, they refused to believe and therefore act like that Babylonians.
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