Dear N T:

You wrote:

 Our Father who are in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

I have seen the phrase ‘Our Father who are in heaven’ written both with and without a comma after ‘Father’. Would the presence of the comma make any difference? Would it make the clause non-defining? Would the absence of a comma make it defining?

First of all, the verb is “art.” This is the now archaic second person singular form of the verb “to be.” I am, thou art, he is, you are, we are, they are.

That form of the Lord’s Prayer comes from either the Book of Common Prayer (1558) or the King James Version of the Bible (1611). Even by 1611 the “thou/thee/thy/thine” second person singular form is becoming rare. However, the King James translators used it to indicate the singular or plural in the Hebrew and Greek original texts. So, for example in John chapter 3, Jesus says, “Marvel not that I say unto thee ye must be born again.” The sentence has both singular and plural forms because Jesus is speaking to only one person (Nicodemus), so addresses him as “thee.” However, the translation shows that the pronoun that would go with “must be born again” is plural—indicating that the necessity to be born again is not just for Nicodemus, but for others as well.

Having said all that, let’s get back to your question.

Of course, the original Greek of the New Testament had no punctuation; it did not even have word divisions in the first century. If there is a comma after Our Father, that implies that the clause is nonrestrictive, that we would know who the prayer is addressed to anyhow. You could make a case for that, since his name is “hallowed,” which in English is too strong a word for a mere mortal, as noble as one’s earthly father may be. With that thought, the clause does not have to be considered defining.

I believe there is a stronger case for not putting the comma there since it emphasizes that the person addressed is indeed our Father in heaven, namely God. That way, it emphasizes for sure which father is meant since everyone since Adam has a biological father. Perhaps even more germane is the fact that “Our Father who art in heaven” is a direct address. Putting the comma in breaks up the direct address into two parts and makes it a bit more confusing and indirect.

Also keep in mind that both the traditional BCP and KJV do not use punctuation marks the same way we use them today. Back in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the various rules had not been standardized. While a period meant the end of a sentence, a stop, the other punctuation marks were often used to show length of pause when speaking rather than a specific grammatical relationship. Back then most people, even when alone, did not read silently the way we are taught today. The pause, then, often contributed to the isochronous accent of the passage, the same way a pause in a piece of music will take a certain number of beats to add to the rhythm. (A comma was the shortest pause, then a semicolon, then a colon, then a period.)