Back in Midian, the Holy One delivers a piece of news that unlocks the Exodus. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan preserves the phrasing with startling specificity: they have come to nought, and gone down from their possessions; behold, all the men who sought to take thy life are reckoned as the dead.
Notice the gradation. First, the enemies came to nought — ruined politically. Then they gone down from their possessions — ruined economically. Finally, they are reckoned as the dead. Not literally dead, the Targum carefully notes. Reckoned as the dead.
Poverty as Death in Rabbinic Thought
The sages of the Talmud (Nedarim 64b) will make this explicit: a poor person is considered as though dead. The Targum anticipates this reading centuries earlier. The Egyptian officials who once sought Moses' life for killing the taskmaster (Exodus 2:15) are still breathing — but they have lost their standing, their wealth, their capacity to do harm. In the rabbinic moral imagination, this is a form of death.
Why does God deliver this news? Because Moses has been carrying the weight of that old crime for forty years. He fled Egypt with a price on his head. The burning bush commissioned him; it did not absolve him. Here, God removes the last obstacle: the men who could have accused you no longer have the social power to do so.
The takeaway: redemption sometimes looks like returning to the place you once fled, with the people who hated you now silent. The Jewish imagination measures justice not only in funerals but in reversals of fortune — when the strong become powerless and the slave becomes a prophet.