It happened exactly as the Lord said.
Moses and Aaron took the furnace ash in their hands, walked out to meet Pharaoh, and Moses flung the ash skyward. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan records the moment with a single terrible phrase: "There came a boil multiplying tumours upon man and beast" (Exodus 9:10).
The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in its Targumic form, does not soften the image. The boil is avabuot — blisters that breed more blisters. A plague that reproduces itself. Ash cast once becomes a sickness that spreads across every body in Egypt, from the courtier in the palace to the cattle in the stall.
The sages who transmitted this Targum wanted readers to feel the multiplication. One handful of ash. An entire nation covered in sores. This is not proportionate punishment in the earthly sense — it is the theology that when God acts, the small gesture carries cosmic weight. A prophet's wrist flicks, and the plague unfolds across a kingdom.
The Maggid pauses here. The ashes that Egypt's furnaces produced while enslaving Israel are the ashes that now rain on Egypt's own skin. The symmetry is not accidental. It is the signature of a God who remembers.