Benjamin prepares his people for their new name with a brilliantly multi-layered description of the change that has come over them. This is a description that plays on multiple simultaneous themes.
a) The first and most obvious is relationship of son/daughter to father. In all societies, this familiar relationship is charged with expectations of mutual obligations. Thus by invoking the child/father relationship, Benjamin simultaneously invokes obligations.
b) Placing Christ as the father in this transformation is interesting, because it establishes a new bond with the future Messiah rather than the present God. This is not to say that they were less worshipful of the present God, but rather that the focus of this special relationship was one that depended upon the atonement of Christ. This is, of course, no new news to modern Christians who understand a relationship with Christ and the father simultaneously, but differently faceted. To the people of Benjamin, however, this was a new concept, with an increasing emphasis on the future Messiah – an emphasis greater than any other people on the face of the earth had at this particular time.
c) Benjamin uses the metaphor of birth as equivalent to a transformation. This suggests that his people would have understood the life of the spirit apart from the body, and the transformation of spirit into body at birth. That transformation from spiritual to physical is new reversed in this new birth, and moves from physical to spiritual (while yet remaining in the physical world).
d) Finally, the use of the transformation to children recalls Benjamin’s structural use of children in his discourse, where the children were the ones who were righteous. The people who might have been the “old men” and others that he cautioned against sympathies to the past contentions are now transformed into children. They are no longer in their rebellious state, but fully within the arms of Christ’s atoning sacrifice.