Peel, pill (Hastings' Dictionary)

The origin of these verbs is parerelly elie, skin, and pilus, hair; but they cannot be traced directly back to these separate sources, because the Old Fr. words peler and piller, from which they come, were confused in spelling before the Eng. words were formed. The confusion was made greater when the (probably) separate Lat. pilare, to plunder, was adopted into French and English, and spelt indifferently ‘pill’ or ‘peel.

’ Brachet says that piller, in the sense of ‘rob,’ ‘plunder,’ was introduced into the Fr. language in the 16th cent. along with many other military words. We find its derivative ‘pillage,’ however, in Fabyan, Chron. i. 114. Peel is the AV spelling in Is 18*7 ‘a nation scattered and peeled,’ ‘a people scattered and eeled’ (jin Wynn, AVm ‘outspread and polished,’ RV ‘tall and smooth,’ RVm ‘dragged away and peeled’). Here ‘peel’ is probably taken in the sense ae to ‘pill,’ te.

pull off the hair, for that is the primary meaning of the Heb. word. But the reference is to the Ethiopians, and as the Heb. verb comes usually to mean to polish (by stripping off superfluous hair), RV and most modern exegetes take the expression in the sense of ΤΟΝ τὴν ‘bronzed,’ referring to the Ethiopians’ tawny skin. In Ezk 29'* ‘Every head was made bald, and every shoulder was peeled’ (mpm στη), the meaning is more primary, ‘laid > by the chafing of a burden (Amer. RV ‘ worn’).

Pill is the spelling in Gn 30%: ® (of the rods in which Jacob ‘pilled white strakes’), where the meaning is clearly to pull off the skin. RV spells ‘peeled.’ Pill occurs also in To 11% ‘When his eyes began to smart, he rubbed them; and the whiteness pilled away from the corners of his eyes’ (ἐλεπίσθη, ἔν ‘scaled’), and 1 Mac 1™m. for AV text ‘pulled off’ (ἐλέπισε, RV ‘ scaled’). Shaks. uses ‘peel’ in the sense of stripping off the bark (‘ pill’ of Gn 30° *), as Mer. of Ven. 1. iii.

85, ‘ The skilful shepherd peel’d me certain wands’; and in the sense of plucking off the hair, 1 Henry VJ. 1. iii. 30, ‘ Peel’d priest.’ He uses ‘pill’ only in the sense of rob: Jimon, Iv. i. 12— *Large-handed robbers your grave masters are, And pill by law.’ J. HASTINGS.