to bring low: to lower someone or something in height, standing, or circumstance, whether God humbles the proud, a person lowers himself, or hardship presses someone down
At root this verb names an action done to where someone or something stands. Its plainest use is physical: to make a high thing low, as when a prophet pictures every mountain and hill leveled to prepare a road. From there it stretches to a person's place in the world, and that is where nearly all of its New Testament weight falls: to bring someone down from a high position, or to take a low place oneself.
Two directions run through these uses, and the New Testament often sets them side by side. In one, God is the unnamed one who does the lowering: he brings down those who push themselves forward, in a great reversal that runs from Mary's song through Jesus' warning that whoever exalts himself will be brought low. In the other, a person lowers himself on purpose, letting go of rank and rights. This is the note struck when Jesus tells his followers to take the low place of a child, and it reaches its depth in Paul's picture of Christ, who emptied himself (κενόω) and then humbled himself all the way to death on a cross.
The same word carries two further shades. Twice it is a command: humble yourselves before God, and he will lift you up, spoken once to call the proud back to repentance and once to steady a church under pressure from a hostile society. And once Paul uses it simply for going without, knowing how to be brought low when money and food run short. Beneath them all lies one action, being made low, whether by God's hand, one's own choice, or hard circumstances, and it is bound up with the settled disposition it is meant to produce, humility (ταπεινοφροσύνη).
There is a history worth knowing here. To the wider Greek world this family of words was mostly an insult, tied to servility and defeat; the proud, great-souled person was the ideal, and lowliness was for slaves. The Greek Old Testament had already begun to turn this around, using the word for the faithful poor whom God defends, much as its Hebrew counterpart to humble or afflict (עָנָה) did. The first Christians completed the turn: once it could be said that God's own Son humbled himself, being brought low became the shape of the life God honors rather than a thing to be despised.
Nuances
Whether Paul's "I know how to be brought low" in Philippians 4:12 refers only to living in reduced material circumstances or also deliberately recalls Christ's self-humbling in Philippians 2:8.
- majorityIt belongs to the vocabulary of economic status: to live in humble circumstances, paired with knowing how to abound and how to be in need. The standard lexicons place it in the status field, not the moral one.; BDAG, s.v. ταπεινόω; Louw and Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, §87.63
- minorityPaul intends a deliberate echo of Christ's self-humbling in 2:8, recapitulating that descent in his own bodily deprivation.; G. Walter Hansen, The Letter to the Philippians (PNTC), on 4:12; Stephen E. Fowl, Philippians (Two Horizons), on 4:12