The Lord’s Prayer ends, in most English versions, with a petition that quietly carries two possible meanings at once. Deliver us from evil — or, as the NIV has it, deliver us from the evil one. The fork in the road is one Greek word: πονηρός (ponēros), here in the form tou ponērou. The full phrase is rhysai hēmas apo tou ponērou, and ponērou can be read two ways.

Taken as a neuter, it means evil in general — the whole sweep of wrong, harm, and corruption in the world. Taken as a masculine, it means the evil one — a person, the devil, the adversary who actively works against God’s people. The Greek form by itself doesn’t settle which is meant; grammarians have debated it for centuries. The KJV and many older translations chose the neuter: deliver us from evil. The NIV chose the masculine: deliver us from the evil one. Both are defensible, and both have been carried faithfully in the church’s prayer tradition.

That ambiguity isn’t a flaw to be cleaned up. It’s part of what gives the line its reach. Pray it the first way and you’re asking the Father to rescue you from the great mass of evil that presses on every life — sickness, injustice, the slow erosion of faith, the harm we do and the harm done to us. Pray it the second way and you’re asking for rescue from a personal opponent, the one who would actively push you toward what you cannot survive. The petition holds both without forcing a choice.

The line also doesn’t stand alone. It’s the second half of a single couplet. And lead us not into temptation — into peirasmon, the testing and ordeal — but deliver us from the evil one. The two halves work together as one petition with two faces: do not bring us into the testing, and rescue us from the one who would want to test us. Read against the first-century expectation of a great end-times ordeal, the couplet asks the Father both to spare his people the trial and to pull them out of the adversary’s reach.

It’s a small word doing a great deal of work. Ponēros names, in a single syllable that can tip masculine or neuter, the full thing we most need rescuing from — whether we picture it as a force or as a face. When you reach that line, you don’t have to decide between the two. The prayer was given for both. You’re asking the Father to deliver you from evil, and from the evil one, in the same breath — the way Jesus, in the garden, prayed to be spared the cup set before him, and trusted the Father to keep him through it.