Pharaoh's patience finally breaks.
"Pharoh said to him, Go from me. Beware that thou add not to see my face to speak before me one of these words that are so hard: for in the day that thou seest my face, my anger will grow strong against thee, and I will deliver thee into the hands of the men who seek thy life to take it" (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 10:28).
The Aramaic paraphrase, preserved in the Targum attributed to Yonatan ben Uzziel, intensifies the threat. Pharaoh does not only banish Moses — he threatens to hand him over to assassins. Ve'ismor yat'cha b'yad gavrin d'ba'ayin naf'shach — I will deliver you into the hands of the men who seek your life.
Who are these men? The midrash tells us that Moses had enemies from his years in Egypt — men who remembered the Egyptian he had killed in his youth, men of the royal bloodline who resented him, men who would gladly kill him if the king merely looked the other way. Pharaoh is threatening to release a death-warrant by simply removing his protection.
And yet, even here, Pharaoh does not kill Moses himself. He threatens. He postures. But the actual act he cannot bring himself to commit. Why? Because some deep part of him has already accepted that this prophet is untouchable.
The Maggid teaches: tyrants threaten most loudly when their actual power has run out. The louder the king's voice, the emptier his authority. The final plague was already in motion. Pharaoh was about to lose his firstborn son, and every firstborn in Egypt besides. His threats were thunder without rain.