The Hail Mary: the full text and where each half came from
The prayer
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst 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.
In short
The Hail Mary is made of two halves from different centuries. The first joins the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Elizabeth’s, both in Luke 1. The second, the petition “pray for us sinners”, is not in the Bible: it appeared in the late Middle Ages and was only fixed in the sixteenth century.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 7 min read
When to pray it
At any moment, and above all in front of something frightening: the second half asks for help at “now” and at “the hour of our death”, the only two moments it names. It is also the most repeated prayer of the rosary — fifty times across the five decades.
The prayer has a hinge, as the Lord’s Prayer does, but this one separates two genres rather than two subjects. The first half is greeting; the second is petition. Nobody speaks that way in ordinary life — greeting first and asking only afterwards is a courtesy the prayer inherited from an age when the formula was still only the greeting.
The verb of the petition is “pray”, and that choice carries the whole devotion. The prayer does not ask Mary to grant, forgive or save: it asks her to ask. The difference slips by in repetition, and it is precisely where the Christian traditions part company — hence the note further down.
The two moments named at the end are not arbitrary either. “Now” and “the hour of our death” are the only two moments any person is certain of passing through. The prayer ignores the intervening future, the one anxiety keeps trying to manage, and asks for help only for the present instant and for the last.
It is worth noticing what Mary says in John’s Gospel, in the only scene where she speaks: “Do whatever he tells you.” It is a line that points away from her. Anyone praying the Hail Mary attentively finds there the measure of the prayer itself.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared First half, first century; second half, late Middle Ages
The two halves come from different centuries, and the seam is almost invisible when the prayer is said quickly. The first is assembled from two greetings in Luke 1: Gabriel’s to Mary, and Elizabeth’s when her cousin arrives. It was already circulating as an antiphon in the West before the eleventh century, and at that stage it ended where the biblical quotation ends, with no petition at all. The name “Jesus” at the close of the first half is a later addition, traditionally credited to Pope Urban IV in the thirteenth century — an attribution repeated for a long time that no contemporary document confirms.
The second half is what turns a greeting into a prayer, and it is not biblical. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death” appears in varying forms through the fifteenth century, chiefly in Italy, and only settles with the reform of the Roman Breviary published under Pius V in 1568. That is where the two-part wording the Catholic world memorised comes from.
The form recited in English is not the wording of any biblical translation published on this site, and that is nobody’s error — the same holds for the Lord’s Prayer. It is a different object: a text fixed by use and by repetition aloud. The biblical text behind the first half appears below, among the passages, and can be compared word for word.
Little-known details
“Blessed art thou amongst women” appears twice in this edition, and only once in the Portuguese one
The word behind “full of grace” is used of nobody else in the New Testament
For centuries the prayer asked for nothing
“Mother of God” was settled by a council, and the argument was not about Mary
What the passages say
26Then, in the sixth month, the Angel Gabriel was sent by God, to a city of Galilee named Nazareth,
27to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the name of the virgin was Mary.
28And upon entering, the Angel said to her: “Hail, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.”
29And when she had heard this, she was disturbed by his words, and she considered what kind of greeting this might be.
30And the Angel said to her: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found grace with God.
31Behold, you shall conceive in your womb, and you shall bear a son, and you shall call his name: JESUS.
The scene the first line comes from. Compare it with the text above: here the angel says “Hail, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.” — three clauses that the recited formula keeps almost intact, which is not the case in every language.
39And in those days, Mary, rising up, traveled quickly into the hill country, to a city of Judah.
40And she entered into the house of Zechariah, and she greeted Elizabeth.
41And it happened that, as Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.
42And she cried out with a loud voice and said: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
43And how does this concern me, so that the mother of my Lord would come to me?
44For behold, as the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.
45And blessed are you who believed, for the things that were spoken to you by the Lord shall be accomplished.”
The second source of the first half. It is Elizabeth, not the angel, who says “blessed is the fruit of your womb” — the prayer welded the two greetings into a single sentence, and the join disappears when it is said at speed.
3And when the wine was failing, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”
4And Jesus said to her: “What is that to me and to you, woman? My hour has not yet arrived.”
5His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
The only scene in John’s Gospel in which Mary speaks, and what she says points to Jesus rather than to herself. It is the passage Catholic devotion most often cites to describe what it means by intercession: she carries the request and redirects the attention.
5For there is one God, and one mediator of God and of men, the man Christ Jesus,
The verse the evangelical reading rests on when it prays to God alone through Christ. It is here because this page does not hide the disagreement: those who pray the Hail Mary and those who do not are reading this line differently, and both readings appear in the note below.