to bow down: to bend the head and body low toward the ground as an act of reverence before God or a superior.
This is one of the Bible's set gestures of reverence. It always describes a real, physical bending low, and it is always aimed at someone worthy of honor: most often God himself, but also an angel, the figure of the prophet Samuel, and Israelite or foreign kings. It belongs entirely to solemn narrative, never to poetry or song.
The word almost never travels alone. In fourteen of its fifteen appearances it is welded to a second, fuller word for worship or prostration (שָׁחָה), the two forming a single stock phrase that Hebrew storytellers reached for whenever someone paid homage. Often the scene adds a detail that fills in the picture: the face turned "to the ground," or the nose and face lowered toward the earth.
There is an old question of whether the word once named only the first move, the dip of the head, with its partner supplying the full drop to the floor. Its ancient relatives in neighboring languages do suggest the head or upper body was originally in view. But by the time of the biblical writers the pair had fused, so that the word simply carries its share of one unified act of bowing rather than a separately timed motion.
Disputed
Whether the verb names a distinct physical motion, a bowing of the head or upper body, that precedes a fuller act of prostration, or whether it functions as a lexicalized formulaic partner to the prostration verb, so that the two verbs together denote a single integrated act of reverential obeisance.
- minorityTwo distinct motions: the verb specifies an initial bow of the head or upper body, derived from the noun for the crown of the head, followed by the fuller prostration of the accompanying verb, which is the stronger act.; W. Gesenius, Thesaurus Philologicus Criticus Linguae Hebraeae, s.v. קדד; Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), s.v. קדד; C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: The Pentateuch (1866), on Gen 24
- majorityA single stereotyped formula (hendiadys): the two verbs are semantically equivalent partners denoting one act of reverential prostration, with קדד serving as the shorter parallel B-word to השׁתחוה, whatever its prehistoric head-related sense.; M. Held, "Pits and Pitfalls in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew," JANES 5 (1973): 173-190; M. I. Gruber, Aspects of Nonverbal Communication in the Ancient Near East (Studia Pohl 12; Rome, 1980), 90-131; H. D. Preuss, "חוה; הִשְׁתַּחֲוָה," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament IV (1980), 248-256