the inhabited world: the earth as the place where people live, along with its people and its governing order
The word is built from the ordinary verb "to dwell," so at root it names the land that is lived on, the peopled and settled earth rather than empty desert, open sea, or the sky above. That basic picture stretches naturally in four directions across the New Testament.
It can mean the inhabited earth as a whole, the wide reach of a message or an event across the settled world. It can narrow to the political world of the day, the Roman Empire, which its own writers proudly called "the civilized world" as if nothing beyond it counted. By a small step it can stand for the people who fill that world, humankind viewed as one great population. And in Hebrews it reaches forward to the world still to come, the future order God has promised.
Because every use shares the one core picture of the peopled world, English almost always settles on the single word "world." The differences are shades of that one idea, drawn out by the setting of each verse. It overlaps heavily with the broader Greek word for the world as an ordered whole (κόσμος) and with the plainer word for the earth as land or ground (γῆ), yet it keeps its own accent: the earth precisely as inhabited and administered.
Nuances
Which entrance into the inhabited world Hebrews 1:6 describes, and therefore which shade the word carries here: the coming world of Hebrews 2:5, or the present earth at the incarnation.
- contestedThe verse looks to Christ's entrance into the coming world, his exaltation and second coming, reading the word as the future world named a few verses later in Hebrews 2:5.; BDAG, s.v. οἰκουμένη; B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews
- contestedThe verse looks to the incarnation, God bringing the firstborn into the present inhabited world at his coming in the flesh.; P. Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NIGTC)