Of all the storms that farmers fear most a hail storm is the worst. A heavy rain may cause flooding, but hail can level a wheat or corn field in short order. Ordinarily hailstones are small, about the size of a pea or smaller, but occasionally much larger stones are generated. Hailstones the size of golf ball are fairly common, but there have been reports of stones as large as oranges. Stones this large can seriously damage houses, automobiles, and actually cause the death of animals and humans. The formation of hailstones is a very complicated phenomenon involving rain, a freezing layer of air, and turbulent air currents with powerful updrafts. Raindrops falling through a frigid layer of air are frozen and fall to the ground as hail. If the air is quite turbulent, the drops are blown back up to the cloud where they pick up additional moisture, and as bigger drops, fall back down through the freezing layer of air to form bigger stones. The more times this recirculation occurs, the larger the stones produced.
Though hailstones the size of oranges may seem pretty big, the Bible predicts much larger ones during the falling of the seven last plagues as a part of God's final judgment on a wicked world. "Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine" (Rev. 18:8). Since a day of prophetic time is equal to one year real time (Eze. 4:6), these plagues must last one year. The seven plagues involve ugly and painful sores, the sea turning to blood with all the marine animals dying, the streams and rivers turning to blood, the sun scorching with fiery heat, darkness covering the earth, the drying up of the river Euphrates, evil spirits like frogs practicing deception, kings of the East rising up, a beast, dragon, and a false prophet leading a rebellion against God, and finally, a great earthquake and hailstones of about one hundred pounds each falling from the sky (Rev. 16, CEV).
Some aspects of these plagues are no doubt allegorical. There is much speculation as to how the seas and rivers are turned to blood, or what is meant by the river Euphrates, the evil spirits like frogs, the kings of the East, and the beast, dragon, and false prophet. However, it is generally thought that the darkness, heat, earthquake, and hail are literal events. The source of this hail is a mystery. The hail falls from the sky, but it is difficult to imagine a storm so wide spread and so violent as to produce one hundred pound stones world wide. So, where do they come from? God told Job that He had them stored somewhere as a treasure. Where could that be? There is one possible source where there is a lot of ice up there in really big chunks; comets are composed mostly of ice. A close encounter between earth and a comet, or perhaps even a direct hit, would cause a worldwide downpour of very large hailstones, but also a great earthquake would result such as has "never been seen before" (Rev. 16:18). Perhaps a comet may be God's "treasures of Hail."
