The Hail Mary, word by word: where each line comes from

Almost nobody learned it. You heard it, and it stayed. The Hail Mary is one of those texts people recite without ever having had to work at it, and that may be why it is never read.

Reading it word by word holds a surprise. The prayer was barely composed at all: its first half is quoted, word for word, out of a single chapter of the Gospel. Which means there is an exact point where the borrowing stops and we start speaking. That point is a name.

The text first.

Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Three verses, not two

The usual account is that the prayer joins two greetings, the angel’s and Elizabeth’s. That is true, and it is one verse short.

The angel first:

Having come in, the angel said to her, “Rejoice, you highly favored one. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.”

Luke 1:28 (World English Bible)

Then Elizabeth, when Mary reaches her house at the end of the journey:

She called out with a loud voice, and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

Luke 1:42 (World English Bible)

You will have noticed something the French reader of this page does not see. In this translation the line about being blessed among women is there twice, in the angel’s mouth and in Elizabeth’s, and the prayer says it once. French Bibles in the Segond tradition print it only in verse 42, so the two greetings there hardly overlap at all. Here they do, and the join is softer than the tidy account suggests.

Then comes the sentence nobody counts with the other two:

Why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

Luke 1:43 (World English Bible)

The mother of my Lord. That is where the title comes from that opens the second half of the prayer. The Council of Ephesus, in 431, confessed it in its short form, Mother of God; Elizabeth had said it her own way, in a doorway, to a cousin who had just arrived. So the prayer does not stop at the greeting. It reads one verse further than it is given credit for.

”Full of grace”

The three best known words of the prayer are a translation, and the same greeting comes out differently elsewhere. The World English Bible has “you highly favored one”. Two verses later the angel says it without metaphor:

The angel said to her, “Don’t be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”

Luke 1:30 (World English Bible)

This is not a translator’s quibble. Full of grace can be heard as a quality, something she would possess in her own right. Highly favored and found favor leave no room for that: someone did the favoring. It is the grammar of the whole chapter, where God is the subject of the verbs, and it is what the question of praying to Mary has to hold together.

The first thing she does with these words

But when she saw him, she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered what kind of salutation this might be.

Luke 1:29 (World English Bible)

This is what recitation erases. We say the greeting from memory, at speed, fifty times over on a rosary day. The person who heard it first did not understand it. She turned it over, wondering what a sentence like that could possibly mean, and the text takes the trouble to say so.

Which means nobody is required to do better than she did. Stopping on a sentence you do not have the bottom of is exactly what happened the first time it was said.

The name, in the middle

Go back to Elizabeth’s line: blessed is the fruit of your womb. She does not say who that is. The name had been given by the angel, earlier and elsewhere:

Behold, you will conceive in your womb, and give birth to a son, and will call his name ‘Jesus.’

Luke 1:31 (World English Bible)

The prayer then does what neither of them did: it slips the name into Elizabeth’s sentence. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. One added word, at the exact centre of the text, and it holds the two halves together.

That is the hinge. Before it, nothing is ours: two greetings received, a title borrowed from a third line. After it, all of it is ours.

The single request

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

The second half is much later, and you can hear the change of register: we stop observing and start asking. There is only one request in the whole prayer, and it arrives last. Everything before it is address.

The word “us” appears only here, and only once. We enter this prayer at the moment of asking, and we enter it in the plural, as in the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. What the request means at bottom, why address it to her rather than to God directly, is another question, and it has its own page: why Catholics pray to Mary. What is visible here is smaller. We call ourselves sinners before we name our need, and we never name the need at all.

”Now and at the hour of our death”

Two moments, and nothing in between. The prayer does not say every day. It does not say all our life. It says now, and the last time.

The first is the stranger of the two, because it is always true. Every time the sentence is said, now means the hour in which it is being said: the kitchen, the car, the waiting room, the bed. The second is the one appointment nobody has the date for and everybody is sure of, and the prayer sets it down without drama, next in line, in the same sentence as the rest.

Saying the Hail Mary today

Say it once, slowly, and stop twice.

First at the name, in the middle. That is where the received words end and ours begin, and you can feel the seam as you cross it.

Then at “now”. Look at where you actually are, since that is what the word points to, and let the request cover that hour rather than a life in general.

If the words do not come at all, that is neither a failure nor a novelty: Mary did not understand the first ones either. The page on how to pray when you don’t know what to say takes five minutes.