The hail did not simply fall. It worked.
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 9:25, the Aramaic paraphrase preserved in the tradition of Yonatan ben Uzziel, records the damage with the care of an accountant: "The hail smote in all the land of Mizraim whatsoever was in the field, of men and of cattle, and all the herbage of the field the hail smote, and every tree of the field it shattered and uprooted."
The Targum adds a detail the plain Hebrew does not emphasize — the trees were not just broken. They were uprooted. V'akar, the Aramaic says. Torn up from the ground. An economy that depended on orchards and grain fields was flattened in a single afternoon.
Every field. Every tree. Every exposed animal. The wealth of Egypt, accumulated across centuries, lay smashed across the soil.
And yet — the Torah tells us in the next chapter that Egypt still had crops left after the hail (the locusts would eat them). How? Because some grain ripens later in the season. The hail took the early harvest. The locust would take the late harvest. Together, the two plagues stripped Egypt across the full agricultural calendar.
The Maggid teaches: the Holy One's judgments are rarely random. They follow the season. They follow the crop. They follow the logic of the land they ruin.