Thou {i} madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with {k} glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands:

(i) This is the first honour of the citizens of the world to come, that they are beside the angels.

(k) For they will be greatly honoured when they partake of the kingdom. He speaks of the thing that will be, as though it were already, because it is so certain.

People's New Testament

2:7 Thou madest him a little lower than the angels. Man, for the time, was made lower than the angels (Ps 8:4).

Thou didst crown him with glory and honour. Yet he was crowned, as the Psalmist tells us, with glory and honor (Ps 8:5),

and didst set him over the works of thy hands. And given dominion (Ps 8:6).

Wesley's Notes

2:7 Thou hast made him - Adam. A little lower than the angels - The Hebrew is, a little lower than (that is, next to) God. Such was man as he came out of the hands of his Creator: it seems, the highest of all created beings. But these words are also in a farther sense, as the apostle here shows, applicable to the Son of God. It should be remembered that the apostles constantly cited the Septuagint translation, very frequently without any variation. It was not their business, in writing to the Jews, who at that time had it in high esteem, to amend or alter this, which would of consequence have occasioned disputes without end.

King James Translators' Notes

lower...: or, while inferior to

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

7. a little-not as Bengel, "a little time."

than the angels-Hebrew, "than God," "Elohim," that is, the abstract qualities of God, such as angels possess in an inferior form; namely, heavenly, spiritual, incorporeal natures. Man, in his original creation, was set next beneath them. So the man Jesus, though Lord of angels, when He emptied Himself of the externals of His Divinity (see on [2544]Php 2:6, 7), was in His human nature "a little lower than the angels"; though this is not the primary reference here, but man in general.

crownedst him with glory and honour-as the appointed kingly vicegerent of God over this earth (Ge 1:1-2:25).

and didst set him over the works of thy hands-omitted in some of the oldest manuscripts; but read by others and by oldest versions: so Ps 8:6, "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands."

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

2:5-9 Neither the state in which the church is at present, nor its more completely restored state, when the prince of this world shall be cast out, and the kingdoms of the earth become the kingdom of Christ, is left to the government of the angels: Christ will take to him his great power, and will reign. And what is the moving cause of all the kindness God shows to men in giving Christ for them and to them? it is the grace of God. As a reward of Christ's humiliation in suffering death, he has unlimited dominion over all things; thus this ancient scripture was fulfilled in him. Thus God has done wonderful things for us in creation and providence, but for these we have made the basest returns.