Pharaoh's response to the slaves' religious request is to tighten the screws. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the logic with cruel precision: the (same) number of bricks which they have heretofore made ye shall lay upon them, and not diminish from it, because they are idle; therefore they clamour, saying, Let us go to offer the sacrifice of a festival before our God.
Notice Pharaoh's theory of religion. He assumes that prayer is a symptom of laziness. A slave with enough work does not have time to petition his God. The solution, then, is more work.
The Accusation of Idleness
The Aramaic phrase because they are idle drips with contempt. Hebrew slaves working from before dawn to after sunset, building Pithom and Raamses on ration-bread and brackish water, are accused of idleness because they asked for a festival. The Targum preserves the accusation to expose its moral obscenity.
And then Pharaoh's chilling administrative instruction: not diminish from it. The old quota stands. The straw supply will be cut (as the next verses show), but the production demands remain. Impossibility becomes policy.
The sages of the Targumic tradition note that Pharaoh's response is the classic signature of tyranny — when the oppressed ask for religious freedom, the oppressor responds by intensifying labor. Pharaoh does not debate theology with Moses and Aaron; he simply makes the slaves' lives worse.
The takeaway: the Jewish imagination has never forgotten how tyranny answers prayer. When a ruler hears a cry for worship and responds with increased labor, he has placed himself on the wrong side of the Exodus. Pharaoh's calculation — that exhaustion will kill the clamor — is the oldest mistake in the book. The clamor only grows louder.