Verse 10 states the purpose of the exaltation of v. 9. God did not merely reward Jesus; he acted so that a universal act of homage would follow. Three things carry the weight:

1. The Isaiah substrate. ἵνα … πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ … καὶ πᾶσα γλῶσσα ἐξομολογήσηται is Isa 45:23 LXX, lifted almost verbatim from the most uncompromisingly monotheistic passage in the prophets — a text in which YHWH swears by himself that no other god exists. Paul applies it to Jesus without apology and without a word of qualification.
2. The name, not the syllables. ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ does not mean homage is offered to the sound ‘Jesus’ as a devotional formula. The article is anaphoric — the name of v. 9, κύριος. The sense is: at the name now borne by Jesus, every knee bows. The bowing is directed to the person who bears it.
3. The threefold cosmos. ἐπουρανίων / ἐπιγείων / καταχθονίων is a totality formula, three genitive plural substantival adjectives depending on πᾶν γόνυ. The most natural reading is personal — intelligent beings in every region of the universe, including the powers hostile to God. This is a statement of universal subjection, not of universal salvation; v. 11 makes it acclamation, but Isa 45 knows compelled acknowledgment as well as glad confession.

The rendering therefore keeps the threefold list as three groups of beings rather than three neuter realms, keeps ‘at the name’ over ‘in the name,’ and keeps ‘bow’ over the flatter ‘bend.’

ἵνα governs two aorist subjunctives spanning vv. 10–11: κάμψῃ and ἐξομολογήσηται. Structurally this is one purpose clause with a doubled predicate, matching the doubled clause of Isa 45:23 exactly. Translations that break v. 10 from v. 11 with a full stop obscure this; the comma at the end of v. 10 in NA28 is correct and preserved here.

Whether ἵνα is strictly telic (purpose: God exalted him in order that…) or shades toward result is debated, but the discourse favors purpose. διό in v. 9 marks God’s response to the obedience of v. 8; ἵνα then gives God’s intent in that response. The aorists are complexive — the whole act viewed as one, not a repeated or progressive bowing.

One further point of syntax: the subject is the distributive singular πᾶν γόνυ (‘every knee’), and the three genitive plurals are partitive/possessive dependents on it — ‘every knee of heavenly ones and of earthly ones and of subterranean ones.’ The genitives are not a separate list of worshippers appended loosely; they specify whose knees.

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LXX Isa 45:23: κατ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ ὀμνύω … ὅτι ἐμοὶ κάμψει πᾶν γόνυ καὶ ἐξομολογήσεται πᾶσα γλῶσσα τῷ θεῷ — ‘by myself I swear … that to me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess to God.’ MT: כִּי־לִ֣י תִּכְרַ֣ע כָּל־בֶּ֔רֶךְ תִּשָּׁבַ֖ע כָּל־לָשֽׁוֹן, where the second verb is tishavaʿ, ‘shall swear.’ Paul follows the LXX’s ἐξομολογήσεται rather than the MT’s ‘swear,’ which tells us which text he is working from.

The alterations Paul makes are small and load-bearing:

• He converts the futures (κάμψει, ἐξομολογήσεται) to aorist subjunctives under ἵνα, subordinating the oracle to the purpose of the exaltation.
• He replaces the LXX’s ἐμοί (‘to me,’ i.e. YHWH) with ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ.
• He inserts the threefold cosmic list, which is not in Isaiah.

That middle move is the whole theological question of the passage. The context of Isa 45 is aggressively exclusive — v. 21, οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλος πλὴν ἐμοῦ; v. 22, ‘turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth.’ To route this homage through the name of Jesus is either idolatry or an identification of Jesus with the one who speaks in Isa 45. Paul evidently intends the latter, and the closing εἰς δόξαν θεοῦ πατρός in v. 11 shows he does not think he has compromised monotheism by doing so.

Paul quotes the same verse in Rom 14:11, there with the referent left as God — which shows he knew perfectly well what the verse said before he applied it here.

Three readings of the dative phrase have serious defenders:

1. Locative/occasional — ‘at the name,’ i.e. at its utterance or proclamation, the knee bows. Supported by the parallel with Isa 45:23’s ἐμοί: the name functions as the point of reference for the homage.
2. Instrumental/causal — ‘by means of the name,’ the name being the ground or authority on which homage is rendered.
3. Dative of the recipient (as if τῷ ὀνόματι = ‘to the name’) — homage offered to the name. Grammatically strained for ἐν + dative, and it risks making the name an object of worship distinct from its bearer.

The binding decision for this corpus renders ‘at the name of,’ which is the more precise for the locative sense of response to the name’s invocation, while ‘in the name of’ remains defensible on OT analogy (בְּשֵׁם יהוה).

What matters more than the case is the referent. The article is anaphoric, pointing back to τὸ ὄνομα τὸ ὑπὲρ πᾶν ὄνομα of v. 9 — which, given the Isaiah quotation immediately following, is κύριος. Ἰησοῦ is therefore a genitive of possession: the name that Jesus now bears, not the name ‘Jesus.’ Reading it as the latter turns the verse into a devotional formula about a syllable and drains the Isaiah allusion of force.

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κάμπτω basically means ‘bend, curve.’ With γόνυ it is a fixed idiom for the posture of worship or submission — never a casual physical action. LXX usage is uniform: 3 Kgdms 19:18 (the seven thousand who have not bowed to Baal), Judg 7:6, Isa 45:23. Paul uses the same idiom for prayer in Eph 3:14, κάμπτω τὰ γόνατά μου πρὸς τὸν πατέρα.

This is a live metaphor in the sense of §8 — or rather a live gesture: the physical image of the knee going down is the point, and English must keep it. ‘Bow the knee’ preserves both image and register; ‘bend the knee’ is too neutral, and any abstraction into ‘submit’ or ‘acknowledge’ discards the data the reader needs.

Proskynesis before a sovereign was the standard ancient gesture of political submission, and imperial-cult contexts in a Roman colony like Philippi would have made the political edge of the image audible. Paul is not muting that.

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ἐπουρανίων καὶ ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων — three substantival adjectives in the genitive plural. Two questions:

Gender. The forms are ambiguous between masculine and neuter. If neuter, the sense is spatial: ‘every knee in heaven, on earth, under the earth.’ If masculine, the sense is personal: ‘of beings in heaven, beings on earth, beings under the earth.’ Since knees belong to persons and the parallel v. 11 requires tongues that can confess, the masculine (personal) reading is the stronger. The rendering supplies ‘those’ / ‘beings’ accordingly, bracketed in the literal line.

Reference. Three main proposals:

• Angels — living humans — the dead (a widely held reading; καταχθόνιοι in Greek inscriptions regularly denotes the dead).
• Angels — humans — demonic powers below (fits Pauline interest in the subjection of the ἀρχαί and ἐξουσίαι, cf. 1 Cor 15:24–27, Col 1:20).
• A comprehensive totality formula not to be dissected — the point being simply that nothing is excluded, comparable to Rev 5:13.

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A NT hapax. Formed from κατά + χθών (‘earth, ground’), thus ‘down under the earth, subterranean.’ Outside the NT it is at home in Greek religious and funerary language: the θεοὶ καταχθόνιοι are the chthonic deities, and the dis manibus / θεοῖς καταχθονίοις formula is standard on grave inscriptions of the imperial period. In Greek poetry and hymnody the word belongs to the vocabulary of the underworld realm and its inhabitants.

Both ‘subterranean’ and ‘under the earth’ are retained as acceptable renderings. ‘Under the earth’ is chosen for the running text because it preserves the spatial image without importing a modern geological flavor. Two renderings to avoid: ‘infernal,’ which drags in Dante, and ‘in hell,’ which imports a soteriological verdict the word does not carry — καταχθόνιος names a location, not a punishment.

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The verse is textually stable. NA28 prints ἵνα ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ πᾶν γόνυ κάμψῃ ἐπουρανίων καὶ ἐπιγείων καὶ καταχθονίων with no variant flagged in the critical apparatus that affects sense.

Minor witnesses show orthographic and word-order fluctuation of the kind expected in a much-recited liturgical sequence, and a scattering of manuscripts read the future indicative κάμψει for κάμψῃ — an assimilation to the future of LXX Isa 45:23 and an easy aural confusion in Koine, where the two forms were near-homophones. The subjunctive is required by ἵνα and is the overwhelming reading.

Metzger’s committee record notes nothing requiring discussion in v. 10. The interpretive difficulty of this verse is entirely exegetical, not text-critical.

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The threefold list drew early comment, and the Fathers largely read it personally rather than spatially.

• Ignatius, Trallians 9, in a creedal summary, speaks of Christ’s being seen by ‘those in heaven and those on earth and those under the earth’ (ἐπουράνιοι, ἐπίγειοι, ὑποχθόνιοι) — the same triad, applied to the resurrection, showing the formula was already current in Asian church language within a generation.
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.10.1, folds the verse into the rule of faith: at the coming of Christ ‘every knee shall bow of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth,’ read as the subjection of all rational creation.
• Origen, On First Principles I.6, reads the third tier as the powers below and builds his account of their eventual subjection on it — the point at which his reading and later orthodoxy part company, and a useful illustration that this verse has always sat close to the question of universal restoration.
• Chrysostom, Homilies on Philippians 7, presses the Isaiah link and insists the homage is to Christ himself, not to a name as a sound, and reads καταχθονίων of the demons — arguing that even those who bow unwillingly bow.

The patristic consensus, then: personal referents, exhaustive scope, homage directed to the exalted Christ. The Fathers did not read this verse as making the audible name ‘Jesus’ an object of reverence in itself.

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The mechanism of the argument is worth stating plainly. Paul takes the confession that most sharply excludes rivals to YHWH — Isa 45, where God swears by himself that there is no other — and makes the name of Jesus the point at which its universal homage is rendered. He does this without arguing for it, as though it needed no defense before a Gentile congregation he had taught.

Bauckham’s category of divine identity is the useful one here: Paul is not adding a second god to a monotheistic scheme, nor promoting a creature to semi-divine rank. He is including Jesus within the unique identity of the God of Israel — which is why v. 11 can end εἰς δόξαν θεοῦ πατρός without any sense of contradiction. Homage to the Son terminates in the glory of the Father.

The shape of the whole is also load-bearing: the one who did not grasp at equality (v. 6), who emptied himself and obeyed to the point of crucifixion (vv. 7–8), is the one before whom the universe kneels. Exaltation follows the descent and does not cancel it. The Christ who is worshipped is the crucified one.

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