to take someone or something inside: to lead, escort, or usher into a place
This is the everyday Greek verb for taking someone in. It is the plain verb for leading (ἄγω) with a prefix meaning "into" fixed to the front, so the picture is always the same: one person conducting another across a threshold, through a doorway, past a city gate, into a courtyard or a house. The one who goes in does not simply walk in alone. Somebody takes them.
That is why the New Testament writers reach for it at moments when a person is handed over to a place they did not choose or could not reach on their own:
- Jesus is seized and marched into the high priest's house (Luke 22:54)
- blinded Saul is led by the hand into Damascus (Acts 9:8)
- Paul is hauled into the Roman barracks by soldiers (Acts 21:37 and Acts 22:24)
The same word carries the opposite mood just as easily. A householder sends his servant to fetch the poor and the disabled off the streets and bring them in to the feast (Luke 14:21), and Mary and Joseph carry the infant Jesus into the temple courts (Luke 2:27). What ties the uses together is not force or welcome but agency: someone else decides that you are going in, and takes you.
Behind the New Testament stands the Greek Old Testament, where this verb is the standard rendering for the Hebrew word for coming or going in (בּוֹא) whenever God promises to bring Israel into the land. Stephen uses it in exactly that frame when he speaks of the tent of meeting carried into the country under Joshua (Acts 7:45), and Hebrews 1:6 stretches it furthest of all: God brings the firstborn into the world, and the angels are told to worship him.
Nuances
Which entrance of the Son into the world Hebrews 1:6 describes. The adverb πάλιν may be a transitional marker introducing a further catena quotation, which points to the incarnation, or it may modify εἰσαγάγῃ, which points to a later entrance; οἰκουμένη is read either of the inhabited earth or, against ἡ οἰκουμένη ἡ μέλλουσα of Hebrews 2:5, of the world to come.
- contestedThe verse describes the incarnation: πάλιν introduces one more scriptural citation rather than qualifying the verb.; B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, on 1:6; F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, rev. ed. (New International Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), on 1:6
- contestedThe verse describes the Son's exaltation and enthronement, with οἰκουμένη understood in light of the coming world of Hebrews 2:5.; Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), on 1:6; William L. Lane, Hebrews 1-8 (Word Biblical Commentary 47A; Dallas: Word, 1991), on 1:6