The foremen walk out of Pharaoh's court knowing they have lost. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the grim recognition: the foremen of the sons of Israel saw that they were in evil, (in his) saying, Ye are not to withhold the assignment of your bricks from day to day.
The Aramaic phrase they were in evil — be-bishta — names the trap with blunt honesty. There is no escape through administrative channels. The king has spoken. The quota holds. The straw will not be supplied.
The Tyranny of Day-to-Day
Notice the Targum's emphasis: from day to day. Pharaoh's edict is not monthly or weekly. It is daily. Every sunrise brings the same impossible arithmetic: same brick count, no straw, beatings if you fall short. The oppression is calibrated to prevent hope from ever accumulating across days.
The sages of the Targumic tradition see this as the deepest cruelty of Egyptian slavery. It was not merely that the work was hard. It was that the failure was guaranteed and daily. A slave could never finish a good day's work. Every evening ended in a deficit that rolled into the next morning.
And the foremen's recognition is the moment hope breaks. They had thought that appealing to Pharaoh might help. It did not. Worse — their appeal seems to have made things worse. When they leave the palace (verse 20), they will run into Moses and Aaron waiting outside, and their fury will spill onto them.
The takeaway: the Jewish imagination remembers what hope looks like just before it breaks. The foremen saw that they were in evil — and that clarity is the last step before the Exodus can begin. God's redemption arrives not to people who still think they can negotiate with Pharaoh, but to people who have finally understood that negotiation with Pharaoh is impossible.