The hymn pivots here. Verses 6–8 traced a descent in Christ’s own voice of action — he did not grasp, he emptied, he humbled himself, all the way down to a slave’s execution. Verse 9 reverses the direction and changes the grammatical subject: ὁ θεὸς now acts, and Christ becomes the object (αὐτόν). Everything from here to v. 11 is what God does with the one who went to the cross.

Three things carry the weight:

1. διὸ καί — the exaltation is the fitting sequel to the humiliation, not its wage. Paul says “therefore,” not “so as to repay.”
2. ὑπερύψωσεν — a compound found nowhere else in the NT, borrowed from LXX psalmody where it describes YHWH’s height above all rivals. God does not merely restore Christ; he raises him to the summit.
3. τὸ ὄνομα τὸ ὑπὲρ πᾶν ὄνομα — the article is emphatic. Not a great name but the name, which v. 11 will name outright: κύριος, the LXX’s standing rendering of YHWH.

The verse is also grammatically forward-leaning: it exists to set up the two ἵνα clauses of vv. 10–11. Read it as the first half of a sentence.

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The verse is textually quiet. NA28 prints τὸ ὄνομα with the article, supported by 𝔓⁴⁶ א A B C and the bulk of the early witnesses. A cluster of later manuscripts and part of the Byzantine tradition drop the article (ὄνομα alone), yielding “a name above every name.”

The articular reading is both better attested and harder: an anarthrous “name” is the easier, flatter sense, and scribes would be more likely to remove a theologically loaded article than to insert one. Metzger’s committee did not rate this a significant variant, and NA28 shows no bracketing.

The difference is not trivial for meaning, however: without the article the phrase is comparative (Jesus outranks other names); with it, the phrase is identifying (Jesus receives the name, the one that stands above all naming). The manuscript evidence supports the identifying reading.

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διό is inferential — “for this reason, therefore.” The adjunct καί is not a second connective but adverbial, and it does real work: it correlates God’s action with Christ’s. O’Brien renders the force as “therefore God also,” marking a divine response answering the human act just described.

The theological question this raises is whether the exaltation is merited. Paul’s grammar resists that. He uses διό (consequence) and then immediately calls the gift ἐχαρίσατο (grace-language). The logic is fittingness, not payment: the one who took the lowest place is the one God places highest. That pattern is already scriptural (Job 5:11 LXX; Ezek 21:31 LXX; and in Jesus’ own teaching, Luke 14:11; 18:14).

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For the first time since the relative pronoun ὅς in v. 6, the sentence takes a new subject. Christ has been the actor throughout the descent; now God is the actor, and Christ is the accusative object. This is deliberate hymnic structure, and it matters for how the whole passage reads: Christ does not exalt himself. The one who refused to seize (οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο, v. 6) is given.

Per the binding glossary, θεοῦ πατρός in v. 11 makes explicit what is implicit here: ὁ θεός in v. 9 is the Father. Nothing in the grammar requires that identification on its own, but v. 11 supplies it.

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The word order is αὐτὸν ὑπερύψωσεν — object before verb. Greek is flexible, but fronting the pronoun here is emphatic and rhetorically pointed: him God exalted — this one, the one just described as executed on a cross. The juxtaposition of σταυροῦ (end of v. 8) with αὐτὸν ὑπερύψωσεν (v. 9) is the hymn’s sharpest seam, and the fronting keeps it sharp. A translation that reads “God exalted him” loses nothing lexically but softens the collision; “him God exalted to the highest place” is closer to the shape.

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ὑπερυψόω = ὑπέρ + ὑψόω, “raise to the utmost height.” It occurs nowhere else in the NT. BDAG glosses “raise to the loftiest height, exalt to the highest place.”

The compound’s home is the Septuagint, and its subject there is normally YHWH or God’s throne:

• Ps 96:9 LXX (97:9 MT): “σφόδρα ὑπερυψώθης ὑπὲρ πάντας τοὺς θεούς” — “you are exalted exceedingly above all gods.” The parallel to Paul’s ὑπὲρ πᾶν ὄνομα is close enough to be deliberate.
• Dan 3:52–90 LXX (Song of the Three): the refrain ὑπερυψοῦτε αὐτὸν εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας — liturgical doxology addressed to God.
• Ps 36:35 LXX (37:35): used of the wicked man towering like a cedar — showing the verb is not exclusively divine, but the doxological usage dominates.

So the diction is not neutral “promotion” vocabulary. Paul reaches for a word whose LXX habitat is God’s own incomparable height, and applies it to Jesus.

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χαρίζομαι is built on χάρις. BDAG: “give freely as a favor, grant graciously.” In Paul the verb regularly carries the flavor of unearned bestowal (Rom 8:32; 1 Cor 2:12; Phil 1:29 — where the Philippians are “graciously given” both faith and suffering).

The choice of verb is the single strongest lexical check on a merit-reading of διό. Paul had ἔδωκεν available (and John 17 uses δίδωμι in comparable contexts). He chose the grace-verb. Whatever fittingness διό asserts between the cross and the exaltation, the name itself arrives as gift.

The middle voice here is the ordinary voice of the verb (deponent in effect) and carries no separate emphasis.

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The article is the interpretive fulcrum. τὸ ὄνομα is definite in the par excellence sense: the name that is simply the name, needing no further specification for a reader raised on the LXX.

In Hebrew usage, הַשֵּׁם (ha-shem), “the Name,” functions as a reverential substitute for the Tetragrammaton (already in Lev 24:11; standard by the Second Temple period). In the LXX the Tetragrammaton is normally rendered κύριος. Verse 11 then supplies the content of “the name” explicitly: κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός. The chain is: God gives Jesus the name → every tongue confesses κύριος → and this happens as a quotation of Isa 45:23, a text in which YHWH swears by himself that all will bow to him.

Two consequences:

1. “Name” here is not merely a title of honor. In biblical idiom a name carries identity and authority; to be given the name is to be included within the identity it designates.
2. Bauckham argues that this is not the promotion of a creature into a divine office but the disclosure of Christ’s inclusion in the unique divine identity — precisely because Isa 45 is the most strictly monotheistic passage in Scripture and Paul applies it without apology.

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The second article τὸ converts the prepositional phrase into an attributive modifier: literally “the name, the [one] above every name.” English needs a relative clause: “the name that is above every name.”

ὑπέρ + accusative is comparative — “above, beyond, surpassing” (BDAG). The repetition of the ὑπέρ- morpheme from ὑπερύψωσεν is almost certainly intentional sound-play: God hyper-exalted him and gave him the name hyper every name.

πᾶν ὄνομα is singular and distributive — “every name,” not “all names” collectively. The scope is unrestricted and looks ahead to v. 10’s threefold cosmology (heavenly, earthly, subterranean): there is no name anywhere in the created order, angelic or human or infernal, that stands at this level. In a first-century setting saturated with named powers — imperial titles, angelic names in Jewish apocalyptic, the named gods and daimones of magical papyri — the claim is polemical, not merely superlative.

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Three LXX threads converge on this verse.

Ps 96:9 LXX — ὑπερυψώθης ὑπὲρ πάντας τοὺς θεούς. Same verb, same ὑπέρ construction, subject YHWH. The nearest verbal parallel.

Isa 52:13 LXX — “ἰδοὺ συνήσει ὁ παῖς μου καὶ ὑψωθήσεται καὶ δοξασθήσεται σφόδρα.” The Servant is “lifted up and exceedingly glorified,” immediately before the account of his suffering and death in 53. If Paul has any Servant text in view, this is the one, and it supplies the pattern of humiliation-then-exaltation with the ὑψόω root and δόξα (compare v. 11’s εἰς δόξαν).

Isa 45:23 LXX — quoted in vv. 10–11, and the reason “the name” must be κύριος: it is YHWH who swears that every knee shall bow.

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The Fathers read this verse under pressure, because an Arian could make it say that the Son received what he did not previously have.

Chrysostom (Homilies on Philippians, hom. 7) insists the exaltation concerns the incarnate economy: what is given is given to the one who took the form of a slave, not to the eternal Word who was in the form of God. The gift adds nothing to the divine nature; it declares the glory of the humbled one.

Athanasius (Orations against the Arians I.37–45) treats the verse at length against exactly this Arian use. His argument: “he was exalted” is said of the flesh, and the exaltation of the flesh is the exaltation of us — the Word, being always Lord, is “highly exalted” in that his humanity is glorified and humanity with it. He is emphatic that ὑπερύψωσεν does not mark a promotion in the Word’s own status.

Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Antiochene tradition read it more straightforwardly as reward for obedience, and later Latin exegesis (Ambrosiaster, Augustine on the forma servi) systematized the two-natures distinction that Chrysostom and Athanasius were reaching for: what is affirmed secundum formam servi is not denied secundum formam Dei.

What the patristic reception shows is that the verse’s difficulty was felt from the start, and that the early answer was Christological grammar rather than textual adjustment. No Father tried to emend the text away.

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Two claims stand in the verse, and the exegesis has to hold both.

The exaltation is God’s act toward the crucified man Jesus. The grammar is unambiguous: the Father is subject, Jesus is object, the verb is aorist and refers to an accomplished event — the resurrection-ascension. Whatever is said about eternal divine identity elsewhere in the hymn, v. 9 says something happened to Jesus in history.

What he receives is the divine name. If “the name” is κύριος (see above), then God gives to Jesus what Isa 42:8 says he will not share: “I am YHWH; that is my name; my glory I give to no other.” Bauckham’s point is that Paul does not experience this as a contradiction, and that the resolution is not two gods nor a deified creature but the inclusion of Jesus in the identity of the one God — which is why v. 11 can end εἰς δόξαν θεοῦ πατρός: the Father’s glory is not diminished by the Son’s acclamation but constituted by it.

Hurtado’s contribution is the cultic angle: this is not abstract speculation but a description of what early Christian assemblies actually did — invoke, acclaim, and bow at the name of Jesus. Verse 9 is the theological warrant for a practice already underway.

For the translator, the practical result is restraint. The verse should not be rendered so as to settle the merit question (§6), and “the name” should stay “the name” rather than being helpfully expanded to “the name Lord” or “the name Jesus.” Paul withholds the content for two verses; the translation should too.

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• διὸ καί → “Therefore … also” (literal) / “That is why … also” (modern). The καί is kept in both; dropping it loses the correlation with v. 8.
• ὑπερύψωσεν → “super-exalted” in the literal tab, per the glossary’s first option, to keep the ὑπέρ- visible; “exalted to the highest place” in the modern tab.
• ἐχαρίσατο → “graciously gave” / “as a gift of grace, gave.” “Bestowed” is close but loses χάρις.
• τὸ ὄνομα → “the name.” The definite article is load-bearing and is retained without expansion.
• The verse ends with a comma in NA28 because the ἵνα clauses of vv. 10–11 complete the sentence. The English keeps a comma (smooth text) or a dash (modern) rather than a full stop.

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