Here is a difficult teaching: the Holy One tells Moses the outcome before the negotiation begins. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan puts it with unsettling clarity: it is manifest before Me that the king of Mizraim will not let you go. Not out of fear of the Mighty One, not out of reverence, not out of any sudden softening — but only after the Memra, the divine Word, has punished him with plagues.
Notice what the Targum adds to the biblical Hebrew. It insists that Pharaoh's refusal is not from fear of Him who is Mighty. A lesser tyrant might eventually bend simply out of dread. Pharaoh will not. His stubbornness is constitutional, almost metaphysical.
The Theology of Foreknowledge
Why tell Moses in advance? The sages of the Targumic tradition answer: so that Moses does not mistake Pharaoh's refusal for his own failure. When the first audience ends in disaster — bricks without straw, beatings in the field — Moses must remember that the script was handed to him at the burning bush.
The takeaway: foreknowledge is not fatalism. God tells Moses the outcome not to strip away his agency but to protect his resolve. The plagues are not a backup plan. They are the main plan, because some hearts only open under the weight of the Memra. The Haggadah will later teach that the story of the Exodus is not a negotiation that went wrong — it is a declaration of sovereignty staged in ten acts.