The Targum gives the baker's dream two readings, the way it gave the butler's dream two readings. This is its interpretation. The three baskets are the three enslavements with which the house of Israel are to be enslaved. But thou, the chief of the bakers, wilt receive an evil award, by the dream which thou hast dreamed... The three baskets are three days until thy death (Genesis 40:18).
Pseudo-Jonathan, redacted in the Land of Israel in the early common era, reads the three baskets as a national prophecy: the three great servitudes under which Israel would labor — Egypt, Babylon, and Edom (the Roman exile), in the classical rabbinic scheme (see Mekhilta; Bereshit Rabbah 44; Pesachim 118a).
Notice the symmetry with the butler's reading. The butler's three vines were the three patriarchs — sources of blessing, rooted, producing wine for the king's cup. The baker's three baskets are the three exiles — burdens carried on the head, exposed to predators from above. The same number, three, inflected toward either redemption or affliction depending on whose history is being written.
The Sages read Joseph's dual reading as a map of Jewish history in miniature. Every prison, every foreign house, every palace courtyard turns out to be encoded with two layers: the personal fate of the man inside it, and the long pattern of the people. Joseph refuses to flatter. He tells the baker the hard truth about three days, and he tells the world, through the baker's dream, about three exiles that are still, from the baker's point of view, unimaginably far away.
The Targum then closes with the personal reading: three baskets are three days until thy death. Joseph does not soften the news. He gave the butler the good answer straight; he gives the baker the bad answer straight. The Sages teach that an interpreter who lies to comfort is not an interpreter. They also teach that the baker, in asking, implicitly asked for truth; it was not Joseph's to withhold.
The takeaway is severe and honest. True reading of the world — of dreams, of signs, of history — does not negotiate. It tells the exile and the redemption in the same calm voice. The tradition trusts us to hear both.