The Israelite foremen march into Pharaoh's court and deliver one of the boldest complaints in the Torah. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders their protest with an expanded final clause: Thou hast not given thy servants the straw, and (yet) say they to us, Make the bricks; and, behold, they beat thy servants, and the guilty treatment of thy people is strong, but it goeth up!
The phrase it goeth up — salka in the Aramaic — is the key. It goes up. The Targum is describing a cry ascending to heaven. The foremen are saying, in essence: you think this is only a labor dispute between you and us, but the record is being filed upstairs.
A Prayer Disguised as a Complaint
The sages of the Targumic tradition read this moment carefully. The foremen are speaking to Pharaoh, but the Targum's verb salka — goes up — is liturgical. Prayers go up. Incense goes up. Smoke from sacrifices goes up. The guilty treatment of thy people is going up the same way.
This is the Targum's quiet theological argument: every unjust blow struck against a slave is already being registered in a heavenly ledger. Pharaoh thinks he is disciplining an idle workforce. He does not realize that each lash of the whip is climbing toward the throne of judgment.
And the phrase thy people is pointed. The foremen call the Hebrews Pharaoh's people — not to flatter him, but to remind him that a king's responsibility extends to the enslaved within his borders. Pharaoh is accountable for what happens to people he has chosen to oppress.
The takeaway: in the Jewish imagination, no act of cruelty stays local. Every blow goes up. The Exodus is what happens when the accumulated ascending cry finally overflows the heavenly ledger — and the Holy One answers in plagues.