The Lord instructs Moses to bring the ninth plague at an unusual hour.
"Lift up thy hand towards the height of the heavens," the Lord says (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 10:21), "and there shall be darkness over all the land of Mizraim, in the morning, at the passing away of the first darkness of the night."
The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, makes an astonishing addition. The plague of darkness is to fall in the morning, specifically at the moment when the ordinary darkness of night is supposed to give way to day. The sun was rising. The first light was breaking on the horizon. And then — it did not.
The Targumist is insisting on a precise theological point. This is not a long night. This is the sun refusing to rise. Dawn itself has been blocked.
The Egyptians worshipped Ra, the sun-god. Every morning of Egyptian life was a ritual reaffirmation that Ra had won his nightly battle and returned to the sky. Now, on this particular morning, Ra did not appear. The sun — the central deity of the entire religious system — was visibly absent from his own throne.
The Maggid teaches: the Holy One did not merely punish Egypt with darkness. He dismantled Egypt's theology with it. The ninth plague was not a weather event. It was the deposing of a god. And Egypt, without the sun to rise on, discovered that its entire sacred calendar depended on a Creator it had never worshipped.