إِنَّهُ جَعَلَهُ أَسَدًا
“He made him a lion,” in the sense of treating or declaring him one.
The verb *jaʿala* can express a rhetorical assignment of a property or status rather than a physical transformation. The intended force is to represent a man's courage as so great that it warrants the lion-class claim.
If the phrase were reduced to “he renamed him Asad,” the strong praise would disappear. The source's discussion therefore distinguishes the lexical label, the sentence's predication and the speaker's deliberate hyperbole.