And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women (see 5:24). The words which clothed the thoughts in these ecstatic expressions of intense joy and thankfulness on the part of the two favored women, Mary and Elisabeth, are in great measure drawn from hymn and song contained in the Old Testament Scriptures.
The song of Hannah, the hymn of Deborah, many of the psalms, the songs of the Canticles, the more glorious of the prophetic utterances, had been ever familiar to both these true women of the people; and they could find no language so fitting as the words of these loved national songs to express the intense joy, the deep awe and gratitude of their hearts.
Think what must have been the feeling of the two—the one finding herself the chosen out of all the thousands of Israel, after so many centuries of weary waiting, to be the mother of the Messiah; the other, long after any reasonable hope of any offspring at all had faded away, to be the mother of Messiah's chosen friend, his herald, and his preacher, the mighty forerunner of the King of whom the prophets had written!