When the Hebrew Bible says Aaron threw down his staff before Pharaoh and it became a serpent (Exodus 7:10), the Targum Jonathan makes a far more terrifying claim. The rod did not become an ordinary snake. It became a basilisk—a creature whose very shriek was lethal.
And the Targum connects this moment to the very beginning of creation. God tells Moses that "all the inhabiters of the earth shall hear the voice of the shriek of Mizraim when I shatter them, as all the creatures heard the shriek of the serpent when made naked at the beginning." The basilisk's cry in Pharaoh's throne room is an echo of the primordial serpent's scream in the Garden of Eden—the moment when the serpent was stripped of its former glory and cursed. Egypt's destruction is being cosmically linked to the fall of the serpent in Genesis.
The Targum also names Pharaoh's magicians: Janis and Jamberes. These names appear nowhere in the Hebrew Bible but became famous in rabbinic tradition. Their magic is described not as sorcery but as "burnings of divination"—a specific ritual technology. And their rods also became basilisks, only to be swallowed by Aaron's.
When God tells Moses to confront Pharaoh at the river, the Targum explains why Pharaoh was there: "he cometh forth to observe divinations at the water as a magician." Pharaoh was not bathing or relaxing. He was performing hydromancy—water divination. The king of Egypt was a practicing sorcerer, and God deliberately chose to confront him at the site of his occult practice.
The plague of blood follows, but the Targum adds a detail: after seven days, "the Word of the Lord had afterward healed the river." The plagues in this telling are not permanent destruction. They are demonstrations followed by divine restoration—acts of controlled devastation that prove God's power over both ruin and renewal.