The significance of name meaning cannot be understated. The meaning of a Godgiven name indicates something about who you are as a person or your role in the greater context of God’s plan, it is an expression of one’s identity in relation to God. Unlike humans who name their children after things that sound nice, or perhaps after a family member, culture, or heritage, and can have personal meaning as well, that is not quite God’s prerogative when He creates or changes a name.
But I think this is a gross inflation of hermeneutical power and too cavalierly dismisses the classical understanding of how a fallen angel, who many theologians identify with Lucifer, became Satan. And because of this interpretation, he also adamantly rejects the plausibility of the traditional view that Lucifer was Satan’s original name prior to his fall. In fact, Satan of the NT is not even mentioned in the OT, it is a later intertestamental development, which is why the NT authors refer to the serpent of Genesis 3 as Satan but not the OT authors. He attempts to argue that we do not call people “ the Mike” or “ the Michael”, so why would the text do so? It is not a proper name, it is a title. If this was truly the Satan (or the Devil) of the NT, which is his proper name grammatically in Greek, why then does the Hebrew text use the definite article “ ha” before his name so that it reads “ the satan”. In his wildly popular and thought-provoking book, The Unseen Realm, he argues that this Satan cannot be the same Satan mentioned in the NT by rule of Hebrew grammar: It is not a personal pronoun. One of those hills is the identity of “the satan” mentioned in Job 1-2 and Zechariah 3. That being said, sometimes he doubles down to die on very small hills, for reasons I don’t quite understand. A progressive revelation of God would later reveal the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who is identified in the New Testament. It was a special status reserved for Yahweh alone (Deuteronomy 33:26 Psalm 68:32-33,104:1-4 Isaiah 19:1). This was a natural doorway for Israelites to accept Jesus as the Christ and worship the Christ as God, given that Jesus identified himself in Mark 14:61-62 as this second power or ‘cloud rider’ of heaven from Daniel 7:13 (cf. Worship was for God alone, but the Angel of the Lord in human form also accepted worship, which blurred the lines between the two quite a bit (cf. He demonstrates how ancient orthodox Judaism held to, what he calls, a “binitarian” view of God prior to the advent of Christianity. Segal’s “Two Powers of Heaven” has done a great deal of good for the Kingdom.
His work on expounding and popularizing rabbinical scholar Alan F. Christian theologian and Old Testament scholar Michael S.
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