"The locust came up over all the land of Mizraim, and settled in all the limits of Mizraim exceedingly strong. Before him there had been no locust so hard, nor will there be like him" (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 10:14).
The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, makes the claim sweeping. Kadamoi lo havu govin tkifin hei k'dein, v'batrei lo yehei k'vatei — no locusts so hard before him, and none will be like him after. A plague that stands alone in both past and future.
This is important. The Torah does not merely say the swarm was large. It says it was unrepeatable. The Holy One deliberately made this eighth plague a one-time event. Locust swarms come and go in the ancient Near East. Egypt's own chronicles record them. But this one, the Targum insists, will never have a twin.
The Maggid teaches: some of the Holy One's interventions in history are singular. They cannot be compared to what came before or what comes after. The ten plagues are not a general category of divine punishment. They are a specific, bounded, named sequence, designed for a specific people at a specific hour. Egypt's suffering was not a template. It was a one-time curriculum.
Which is also why, millennia later, the Haggadah still counts them out one by one at the Seder table — dam, tzefardea, kinim — because they are not a concept. They are a list. Each one happened once and will not happen again.