Hail – I Mean HAIL Like You’ve Never Seen Before!

Exodus 9:13-35

¹³Then the Lord said to Moses, “Rise up early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, “Let my people go, that they may serve me. ¹⁴For this time I will send all my plagues on you yourself, and on your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is none like me in all the earth. ¹⁵For by now I could have put out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. ¹⁶But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth. ¹⁷You are still exalting yourself against my people and will not let them go. ¹⁸Behold, about this time tomorrow I will cause very heavy hail to fall, such as never has been in Egypt from the day it was founded until now. ¹⁹Now therefore send, get your livestock and all that you have in the field into safe shelter, for every man and beast that is in the field and is not brought home will die when the hail falls on them.”’ ²⁰Then whoever feared the word of the Lord among the servants of Pharaoh hurried his slaves and his livestock into the houses, ²¹but whoever did not pay attention to the word of the Lord left his slaves and his livestock in the field. ²²Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward heaven, so that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt, on man and beast and every plant of the field, in the land of Egypt.” ²³Then Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and fire ran down to the earth. And the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt. ²⁴There was hail and fire flashing continually in the midst of the hail, very heavy hail, such as had never been in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. ²⁵The hail struck down everything that was in the field in all the land of Egypt, both man and beast. And the hail struck down every plant of the field and broke every tree of the field. ²⁶Only in the land of Goshen, where the people of Israel were, was there no hail. ²⁷Then Pharaoh sent and called Moses and Aaron and said to them, “This time I have sinned; the Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong. ²⁸Plead with the Lord, for there has been enough of God’s thunder and hail. I will let you go, and you shall stay no longer.” ²⁹Moses said to him, “As soon as I have gone out of the city, I will stretch out my hands to the Lord. The thunder will cease, and there will be no more hail, so that you may know that the earth is the Lord’s. ³⁰But as for you and your servants, I know that you do not yet fear the Lord God.” ³¹(The flax and the barley were struck down, for the barley was in the ear and the flax was in bud. ³²But the wheat and the emmer were not struck down, for they are late in coming up.) ³³So Moses went out of the city from Pharaoh and stretched out his hands to the Lord, and the thunder and the hail ceased, and the rain no longer poured upon the earth. ³⁴But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart, he and his servants. ³⁵So the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people of Israel go, just as the Lord had spoken through Moses.

When tremendous storms rage through the countryside they also rage through our living rooms thanks to television. Last week we watched as South Carolina was devastated by rain and floods. There were some who were (I believe arrogantly) calling it a 1,000 year flood. How do they know that? How could they know what the weather was like off the coast of South Carolina 750 years ago? They don’t. Anyway – it was fierce storm and it left shattered lives and even death in its wake. Now multiply that storm several times and you might come close to the storm that God sends to Egypt as the seventh plague. Not only does He send life ending hail, there is also wind, thunder, and lightning – so I think that we can include tornado action and fires in the mix as well. In 9:23 “lightning flashed down to the ground” renders literally as “fire was going to the earth.” In 9:24 “lightning flashed back and forth” translates literally as “fire was fetching all around.” Suffice it to say, this plague comes with epic consequences.

The explanation given him in these verses is clear and simple: Pharaoh must learn that Yahweh alone is supreme, the implication being that the gods in whom Pharaoh had trusted and whom he represented were essentially nothing (9:14); the earlier plagues, hard as they were on the Egyptians, were actually examples of restraint since God already could have sent at any time a fully destructive plague to eliminate the Egyptian population entirely (9:15).

Stuart, D. K. (2006). Exodus (Vol. 2, pp. 231–232). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Verse 25 delineates the damage and in the usual order of relative worth: humans first, then animals, then plants. Nothing alive in the open could have remained undamaged. Humans and animals were killed and anything growing in fields was beaten down. Although trees might have lost smaller branches but survived alive, their fruit would have been knocked off and smashed on the ground under the force of the falling hailstones.

Shockingly, Moses seems to go out into the storm to pray for God to relent and stop the destruction. By going out of the city into the open (the “field”) to pray while the unprecedented hailstorm continued unabated during his journey, Moses showed his complete trust that the hail could not harm him. He not only could travel through the hail but could stand and pray for the end to the hail in the very location—exposed, out of doors—that was otherwise fatal to people and animals; he could go into the area of danger and remain unharmed. His action of going “out of the city” was, in other words, a further demonstration of Yahweh’s differentiation between the Israelites and the Egyptians. Moses stated not merely that he would pray but made clear that his prayer would be to Yahweh, the one true God that Pharaoh and his people needed to learn to fear. He asserted that the purpose of his prayer, bringing to a conclusion the plague, would be to help convince Pharaoh that Yahweh owns the world.

Stuart, D. K. (2006). Exodus (Vol. 2, pp. 234–235). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

The plague of boils hurt the Egyptians and now God ratchets up the pain because the plague of hail actually kills those who would disregard the gracious warning they had been given. For the Pharaoh this needed to be a clear message – disregard the True God to your peril. By this point in the story the Pharaoh’s heart is truly hard and God is helping him with that choice. After the storm abates, so does his “repentance”. He goes right back to stubbornly refusing to hear and heed God’s voice.

Instead of focusing on the stubborn heart of the Pharaoh, let’s focus instead on the overwhelming faith of Moses who would go out into the storm to pray for release. I’ve often thought that the reporters who stand on the beach in the heart of a hurricane are a foolish people. But this – to stand in the hail and know that God won’t allow you to perish is a huge leap of faith. If anyone’s faith has grown as a result of these plagues it is Moses’. He has come to believe that God is protecting the Hebrews as they continue to go unscathed. He is a Hebrew – so he can pray in the heart of the storm. And there it is – as God’s people we can always pray in the heart of the storm. God will do what God will do and we can always stand on the fact that He will do what is best for us every time.