The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 9:24 reaches for superlatives: "There was hail, and fire darting among the hail with exceeding force: unto it had never been the like in all the land of Mizraim ever since it was a nation and a kingdom."
The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the tradition of Yonatan ben Uzziel, uses a striking phrase — min d'havat l'ama v'malchu — from the day Egypt became a nation and a kingdom. The Targumist is measuring the storm against the full span of Egyptian civilization. No dynasty, no pharaoh, no priestly chronicle recorded anything like this.
And inside the hail, the fire kept darting. Mishtaga, the Targum says — leaping. Shooting. A flame that could not be contained by the ice around it, and an ice that could not extinguish the flame within it.
Egypt's wise men, the same astrologers who had already been unable to stand before Moses because of the boils, had no framework for this. Their star-charts had no column for fire-inside-hail.
The Maggid teaches: the Holy One sometimes teaches not by sending what the wise can explain, but by sending what they cannot. When the categories of a society break, its gods break with them. Egypt's theology began to fracture in that storm. Pharaoh would need one more plague to feel the crack.