And it shall come down as the
forest comes down. This entire verse appears to be damaged beyond repair. The
first word in the received text is barad, “hail” (though the
vowel-points make it look like a verb), which makes no sense; it has been
emended here in accordance with one Hebrew manuscript and two ancient versions
to yarad, “shall come down,” which at least yields semantic parallelism
in the line. Even so, it is unclear what is being said, and attempts to explain
the line or recover an original version that lies behind it have been
unavailing. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019], 2:727)
