• Did they not sometime cry "all hail" to me? So Judas did to Christ."
And in Macbeth, I. v. 6, he turns ' all hail ' into a verb, ' Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it, came missives from the king, who all-hailed me, "Thane of Cawdor.'"
Hail ! is found in the Gospels only, and always as tr. of Xa'ipe (the imperat. of xaipfii', to rejoice), a common salutation in Greek writers, and repre- sented in Lat. by Ave ! or Salve ! The Vulg. uses • Ave ! ' in all the passages, Mt 26" 27^, Mk IS's, Lk 1^, Jn 19». The Eng. ' hail ' is as old as Wye; it was introduced again by Tind. and accepted by all the VSS except Gen. in Mt 26« 27=^ ' God save thee.' In Mt 28' the plu. x'^'p^'f occurs, where Wye. gave ' Heil ye ' ; but Tind. ' All hayle,' whom the rest of the VSS followed, except Gen. ' God Bave you.' J. Hastings.
HAIL (Ti? bdrad, ^ x'^^af*) is mentioned in Scripture 31 times, and always as an instrument of divine judgment. A grievous haU was the seventh plague in Egypt (Ex 9'*^) ; and as in that country hail, like rain, falls rarely, and when it occurs is generally slight (the annual rainfall in Cairo being under an inch), the catastroplie was the more remarkable, and was the first of the plagues which were directly fatal to men (w.^'- ^). Ilail is, liow- ever, not unknown in Egypt. On Aug. 13, 1832, a brief and local but severe hailshower fell, and some of the stones are said to bave weighed several ounces.
The ancient Egyptian word for hail, dr, is also
applied to a driving shower of sand and stones : in tlie contest between llorusand Set, Isis is described as sending upon the latter dr n Sd, ' a hail of sand." Id Coptic hail is named aA nt6 T(t)6. ' stones from heaven.'
Lightning bein^ also comparatively infrequent, this feature of the plague is emphasized in the narrative, ' flashing continually amidst the hail ' (KVni v.--«; see also Wis W" , Sir 46«, Ps 18'«- '• 78" 105'-).
Hail accompanies electrical disturbances, and la commonest at the earlier part of the day, before the ascending current from the heated land is established, and when there is the greatest varia- tion of temperature and amount of vaiwur in suc- cessive strata of tlie atmosphere. The vapour, carried aloft by whirling currents, condenses as it ascends through colder strata into waterdrops which at higlier levels become frozen, and, when carried laterally out of the ascending current, fall as hall. Often in their descent they are again caught by the ascending vortices and become nuclei of additional condensation, becoming coated with fresh lamella; of ice. (For forms of hailstones see Huchan's Meteorology, 2iid ed. p. 106). In the act of falling, hailstones often cohere, forming by the pro- cess of regelation solid masses, which do immense damage to vegetation, and notably to vines (Ps 78'"). Prof. Joannis of Bordeaux records the fall of stones of 200 grammes weight.
The localization of the plague (Ex 9^) is in accord with common experience. The CTeat hail- storm of 13th July 1788, which destroyed property valued at £1,000,000, crossed Europe in two belts about 12 miles apart, each belt being from 7 to 10 miles wide and about 400 miles long. The hail- shower of 18th April 1850, which destroyed £27,00^ worth of property in Dublin, left a whole district of the city untouched.
The season of the plague was probably the end of Jan., when the flax was in bloom and the barley (which ripens 6 months af tersowing, and is harvested about the end of Fel). ) was in the ear (v."). W keat, which does not come into ear until about a month later, escaped (v.*^), to become afterwards the prey of the locusts (10'"). At this season hailstorms are most frequent in Levantine lands. The storm in the HaurSn, recorded by Mohammed el-Chateb el-Bosrawi, which destroyed many men and an immense number of cattle, occurrea in Feb. 1860.
Hail falls most commonly by day, at the time when men are at their work (Ex 9"-^). Out of 440 consecutive hailstorms registered, only 18 occurred at night. This was noticed long ago by Venerable Bede, 'interdiu sjepius quam noctu decidunt' (De Nat. Her. xxxiv.).
In Ps 78'* Sojq is used as a parallel with bdrdd. This is a hapax hgoinenon, and is tr. ' frost ' (AV and KV), but Kimchi and Ibn Ezra regard it as meaning ' hail.' It is rendered in AVm and RVm ' great hailstones,' which is probably correct. Rashi and the Targumists suppose that the word refers to locusts (see also Lee's Lexicon, p. 211). LXX has irdxi-Vi hoar frost. Michaelis and Ges. conjecture ' ants,' but these guesses are groundless.
By haUstones the Amorites were smitten at Bethhoron, Jos 10", and the size of the stones is here emphasized, as in Sir 46'. There are many authentic records of large stones formed by revela- tion. In a storm at Kazoria in Spain, 15th June 1829, stones fell w'hich weighed 2 kOos., and in the great storm of 24lh July 1818 in Orkney the stones were as large as goose eggs, and in 9 minutes 9 inches of ice had fallen. In a similar shower on 7th May 1865 at Cfttalet the hailstorms are said in the official report to have made heaps 16 feet high. One great concreted mass of stones which fell in Hungary, 8th May 1832, was 3 feet in