to be squeezed into a space too narrow to move in: hemmed in, with no room left
The word is built from two ordinary Greek words, one meaning "narrow" (στενός) and one meaning "space." It named a physical problem long before it named a feeling:
- ships with no room to maneuver in a tight strait
- an army caught in a pass with mountains on both sides
- flesh in the body compressed by what presses around it
Everyday letters from the time use it the same plain way, for officials complaining that there is no room left in their quarters.
By the first century it had also become a common way of saying that someone was in dire straits, and the Greek Old Testament had made it the language of a besieged city and of covenant judgment. The picture inside it stayed visible all the same, and Paul writes as a man who can still see it. In his accounts of hardship he sets it beside a word for pressure bearing down from outside (θλίβω), and the difference is between a weight pressing on you and walls closing in until there is nowhere to stand.
Paul uses this verb only twice, and the second time he turns it inward. He tells the Corinthians that his own heart has been opened wide (πλατύνω) and that the cramped space is not in him but in their affections toward him. The same word that pictures a city with the walls closing in now pictures a heart with no room in it for another person, and a few lines later he asks them plainly to make room for him (χωρέω).
Nuances
Whether the constriction in 2 Corinthians 6:12 is the Corinthians' withheld affection toward Paul or the outward pressure they feel from their surroundings.
- majorityRelational: Paul's heart is opened wide and the cramping lies in the Corinthians' own affections, which is why he immediately asks them to open wide in return. The sequence of wide, narrow, wide across 6:11 to 6:13, the alternation of first and second person, the plea to make room in 7:2, and the unanimous patristic reading all support it.; V. P. Furnish, II Corinthians, Anchor Bible 32A (1984); M. E. Thrall, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, ICC (1994); M. J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2005); Á. Pereira-Delgado, The Biblical Annals (2024); John Chrysostom, Homilies on 2 Corinthians
- minorityCircumstantial: the constriction continues the hardship list of 6:4 and names the anxious pressure the Corinthians feel in their pagan social setting, not any coldness toward Paul, which leads on to the warning of 6:14.; C. Land, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (2021)