The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 9:14 preserves a warning that cuts through every illusion Pharaoh ever held.
"At this time I will send upon thee a plague from the heavens," the Lord declares, "and all My plagues Wherewith I have plagued thee thou wilt cause to return upon thy heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, (plagues) which have been sent from before Me, and not from the magic of the sons of men, that thou mayest know that there is none like Me in all the earth."
This is the theological hinge of the plague narrative. Egypt lived by magic. Its court astrologers, its priests, its rituals all assumed that the hidden forces of the world could be bent by the right incantation. And Pharaoh, watching the first plagues unfold, kept looking for the trick — the human hand, the concealed spell.
The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum long attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, insists: not from the magic of the sons of men. These plagues have no conjurer. They are min kodam — from before the Lord. Direct. Unmediated. And their purpose is not destruction but revelation: that thou mayest know that there is none like Me in all the earth.
The Maggid teaches: the plagues were a curriculum. Every blow taught Pharaoh one lesson he refused to learn — that the God of Israel is not one power among many. He is the only one.