Verse 7 is the hinge. Verse 6 stated what Christ did not do (he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited); ἀλλά now states what he did. Three participles hang off the one finite verb ἐκένωσεν (“he emptied”): λαβών (taking), γενόμενος (coming to be), εὑρεθείς (being found). The main verb is negative in shape — a self-divestment — and the participles fill in its content: the emptying is the taking of a slave’s form, not a separate prior act of subtraction.

Three vocabulary choices carry the theological freight, and Paul deliberately does not repeat himself:

• μορφή — the same word as v. 6 (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ). Form of God → form of a slave. This is the hymn’s central antithesis.
• ὁμοίωμα — “likeness.” Genuine correspondence, but a word chosen with some reserve: he came to be in the likeness of men (plural — the human race), not merely to resemble one man.
• σχῆμα — outward figure, the way a thing presents itself to observers. Distinct from μορφή and lighter than it.

The rhetorical movement is downward and public: from divine form, to slave form, to human likeness, to how he looked to anyone watching. Verse 8 will take it one step further, to the cross. The register is hymnic, and the rendering keeps the participial clauses as clauses rather than dissolving them into finite verbs.

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κενόω = “to empty, make empty, make void.” Elsewhere in Paul it is always figurative and never has a genitive of content: preaching is emptied (1 Cor 1:17), faith is voided (Rom 4:14), boasting is nullified (1 Cor 9:15; 2 Cor 9:3). BDAG accordingly glosses the Philippians use as “to divest oneself of position or prestige.”

That lexical pattern is decisive against reading ἐκένωσεν as though it named a substance emptied out. The text supplies no object of the emptying — only the reflexive ἑαυτόν, which stands in the emphatic first position. He emptied himself; and the aorist participle λαβών, coterminous with the main verb, tells us how: by taking. The emptying is by addition, not subtraction.

The rendering “emptied himself” is retained rather than a paraphrase such as “made himself nothing,” because the metaphor is live (§8) and the reader needs the image intact. What the image means is argued, not smoothed.

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μορφή is held to the glossary decision made at v. 6: “form” — the mode of existence in which a thing’s real character is expressed and recognized, not a costume. The rendering must be identical in both verses or the hymn’s antithesis is lost in English.

δοῦλος is “slave,” not “servant.” The word denotes owned, non-free status; first-century usage across papyri, Epictetus, and the LXX is unambiguous about the social category, and Philippi was a Roman colony where the distinction between servus and free was the basic fact of social life. Softening it to “servant” (§5, §9: no sanding down of ancient social institutions) blunts precisely the reversal Paul is exploiting — the one in God’s form takes the form of the lowest legal status in the empire.

Whose slave? The text does not say, and the anarthrous δούλου is generic. Two readings run through the literature: slave of God (linking to the Isaianic Servant, ‘ebed YHWH, LXX παῖς/δοῦλος), or slavery as the human condition of subjection — to death and the powers — over against the freedom of God. The rendering leaves it open, as the Greek does.

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ὁμοίωμα in the LXX renders demut and tselem-adjacent vocabulary and covers both “likeness/image” and “form, appearance” (Gen 1:26; Deut 4:16–18; Ps 105[106]:20; Ezek 1:5 of the living creatures). Its force is real resemblance, not mere seeming; but it stops short of asserting simple identity, which is why the word does its work here. Paul uses it similarly in Rom 8:3 (ἐν ὁμοιώματι σαρκὸς ἁμαρτίας) — genuinely in flesh, but not simply identical with sinful flesh.

The plural ἀνθρώπων is generic and inclusive: “men” in the sense of human beings, the race, not males as such (§3 — grammatically masculine, referentially generic). The rendering keeps the masculine generic “men” because the singular ἄνθρωπος at the end of the verse must match it, and because the plural-to-singular movement (the race → one man visible among them) is a structural feature of the line. A footnote-level note is the right place to record that the referent is humanity as such.

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σχῆμα is the outward figure, bearing, the aspect a thing presents — in 1 Cor 7:31 the σχῆμα of this world is what is passing away. Ancient and modern lexicography both distinguish it from μορφή: μορφή is the form that expresses what a thing is; σχῆμα is how it looks. Paul’s shift of vocabulary here is deliberate and the English should mark it. Hence “outward appearance” for σχῆμα against “form” for μορφή — never the same English word for both.

εὑρεθείς (aor. pass. ptc. of εὑρίσκω) is not “was discovered by surprise.” In Koine, especially under Semitic influence, the passive of εὑρίσκω often functions as little more than “proved to be, turned out to be, was found” — the state as it appeared to observers. The passive keeps an implicit onlooker in view: to human eyes he was a man, and nothing about his appearing said otherwise.

ὡς here is not “as if” (contra-factual) but comparative-identifying: he was found, as regards how he presented, to be a man.

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One finite verb, three participles. The syntax decides the theology, and the syntax is genuinely open at one point.

λαβών — aorist participle, same time-frame as ἐκένωσεν, following it in the sentence. The standard reading is modal/means: he emptied himself by taking the slave’s form. Grammatically an aorist participle after the main verb can also be attendant-circumstance (“emptied himself and took”), which is slightly weaker but does not change the sense much.

γενόμενος — coordinated with λαβών, filling out the same act. Note the verb: not ἦν but ἐγένετο-stock — he came to be, entered a state he was not previously in. Set against ὑπάρχων in v. 6 (existing, ongoing), the contrast between eternal being and a becoming is built into the verbs and should survive into English. Hence “coming to be in the likeness of men,” not the flatter “being born.”

εὑρεθείς — introduced by καί. Punctuation is at stake: NA28 places a high point (·) after γενόμενος, which throws καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος forward to modify ἐταπείνωσεν in v. 8 (“and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself”). Older strophic reconstructions (Lohmeyer) attached it to v. 7 as the close of the strophe.

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The text of v. 7 is unusually stable; NA28 records no variant that affects the sense, and the UBS committee assigned it no rating because no serious division exists.

Minor witnessed variations worth naming:

• ἀνθρώπων (plural, ℘46 א A B C D F G Ψ 33 and the great mass of witnesses) vs. ἀνθρώπου (singular, a few minuscules and some versional evidence). The plural is secure; the singular is an easy assimilation to the following ἄνθρωπος.
• Some witnesses add γενόμενος or ὤν after ἄνθρωπος to smooth the syntax across the verse boundary — a scribal tidying of exactly the punctuation problem discussed above, and evidence that ancient readers already felt the difficulty.
• Order variation around ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν appears in a handful of later manuscripts; the emphatic-reflexive-first order of NA28 has both the earliest and the widest support.

No doctrinally significant variant here. What is contested in this verse is interpretation, not text — a distinction worth stating plainly.

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The verse was a load-bearing text long before the kenotic debates.

Irenaeus (Haer. 3.19–22) uses the slave-form/God-form pairing to argue that one and the same subject is both — the exchange is real precisely because the person is one.

Chrysostom (Hom. in Phil. 7) presses ἐκένωσεν hard against both Arian and docetic use: against the Arians, the emptying presupposes that there was a fullness of divine form to empty; against Marcion and the docetists, μορφὴν δούλου λαβών means a real taking, and ὁμοίωμα does not mean phantom. His formula is that Christ took what he was not without ceasing to be what he was.

Cyril of Alexandria and later Leo (Tome) work the same line into the Chalcedonian settlement: the κένωσις is the mode of the union, not a diminution of deity.

Relevant to translation: no ancient reader took ἐκένωσεν to mean divine attributes were laid aside. That reading is a nineteenth-century development. Recording this is not an argument from tradition against the lexicon — it is evidence about how competent native readers of Greek understood the metaphor.

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1. “emptied himself” — the live metaphor is retained (§8). Paraphrase would decide the contested question in the main text.
2. “form” for μορφή in both v. 6 and v. 7; “outward appearance” for σχῆμα. Two Greek words, two English words.
3. “slave” not “servant.” The social category is data, not a discomfort to be managed (§5, §9).
4. “coming to be” for γενόμενος, holding the contrast with ὑπάρχων in v. 6.
5. “men” for the generic masculine plural ἀνθρώπων, with the generic reference noted rather than neutralized in the text (§3).
6. The participial architecture is preserved as participles; the hymn’s downward cascade is its rhetoric, and finite verbs would flatten it (§10, poetry/hymn).
7. The trailing dash after ὡς ἄνθρωπος marks the clause’s syntactic pull into v. 8 without overriding the verse boundary.

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