Exodus 1.22:
וַיְצַ֣ו פַּרְעֹ֔ה לְכָל־עַמֹּ֖ו לֵאמֹ֑ר כָּל־הַבֵּ֣ן הַיִּלֹּ֗וד הַיְאֹ֨רָה֙ תַּשְׁלִיכֻ֔הוּ וְכָל־הַבַּ֖ת תְּחַיּֽוּן׃
συνέταξεν δὲ Φαραω παντὶ τῷ λαῷ αὐτοῦ λέγων Πᾶν ἄρσεν, ὃ ἐὰν τεχθῇ τοῖς Ἑβραίοις, εἰς τὸν ποταμὸν ῥίψατε· καὶ πᾶν θῆλυ, ζωογονεῖτε αὐτό.
And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.
The Septuagint’s version was turned into verse like so by the Hellenistic tragedian Ezekiel (Exagoge 12–13):
ἔπειτα κηρύσσει μὲν Ἑβραίων γένει
τἀρσενικὰ ῥίπτειν ποταμὸν ἐς βαθύροον.
Howard Jacobson wrote a note in 1977 about these two verses.1 According to him the received text presented two problems; first, that the dative Ἑβραίων γένει suggested that Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew people to cast their own sons into the river, which was plainly nonsensical; second, that a word as general as τἀρσενικὰ (“the males”) did not refer to infants only, as it should have, but to all males. “Thus,” he wrote, “the text as it stands in Ezekielos must mean that all the Jewish males were ordered thrown into the Nile!” For these reasons, Jacobson proposed emending γένει to γένη (“offspring”), yielding the meaning “Pharaoh commanded that the male offspring of the Hebrews be cast into the deep-running river.”
Nevertheless, when Jacobson edited the whole Exagoge in 19832 he printed γένει, omitting to incorporate or even mention his own emendation of eight years prior. This was not a very responsible thing to do. If you publish a conjecture and then abandon it, unless you explain why you changed your mind you will make your readers wonder how serious you ever were about reasoning your way to a correct text.
That said, I agree with Jacobson’s implicit admission that his emendation was questionable. There is nothing wrong with the received reading γένει. It is a straightforward equivalent of τῷ λαῷ αὐτοῦ in the Septuagint (a fact passed over by Jacobson in 1977), and apparently means “Pharaoh commanded his own nation,” i.e. the Egyptians. Despite the occurrence of λαὸν Ἑβραίων at verse 107 and Ἑβραίων γένους at 155, I do not think that the received text of 12–13 requires Ἑβραίων to be read as an appositional genitive with γένει. Rather it can construed with τἀρσενικά, these words together rendering the Septuagint’s noun-phrase Πᾶν ἄρσεν, ὃ ἐὰν τεχθῇ τοῖς Ἑβραίοις. Hence we may translate:
Then he ordered his people to cast the males of the Hebrews into the deep-flowing river.
It is certainly true that τἀρσενικά out of context does not refer unambiguously to infants. But we are not out of context here. Moses’ prologue to the Exagoge is an allusive and compressed summary of the fist chapters of Exodus, and the author of a poem like this can be forgiven for expecting his readers to fill in the gaps of sense.
Meanwhile, if we do away with the dative γένει as Jacobson proposes, it is hard to know how what grammatical sense can now be made of κηρύσσει … τἀρσενικά ῥίπτειν, which is missing the personal object of the commandment. On this point Jacobson reassures us that “the absence of an explicit personal object after a verb of command with an active infinitive governing a direct object is routine Greek and can be seen at Ezekielos 183.” I don’t know about routine Greek, but I can at least flip to Exagoge 182–3 in Jacobson’s edition, and read:
ἐν σπουδῇ τε γάρ
βασιλεὺς κελεύσει πάντας ἐκβαλεῖν χθονός.
Apparently Jacob thought that the indirect personal object of κελεύσει was missing. But he should have consulted Exodus 12.33, which was the source of these verses in the Exagoge:
καὶ κατεβιάζοντο οἱ Αἰγύπτιοι τὸν λαὸν σπουδῇ ἐκβαλεῖν αὐτοὺς ἐκ τῆς γῆς.
Here the personal object of κατεβιάζοντο is clearly τὸν λαὸν, and we are probably meant to understand “the Egyptians pressed the people to get themselves in haste out of the land.” Letting the Septuagint’s αὐτοὺς drop, Ezekiel seems furthermore to have used ἐκβαλεῖν in an intransitive sense of “depart,” which was incidentally the same decision taken by the old Latin versions (and later Jerome), who translated ἐκβαλεῖν αὐτοὺς ἐκ τῆς γῆς as de terra exire. Whatever is going on in it syntactically (and there is some room for debate), Exagoge 182–3 is not a straightforward example of the “routine” construction claimed by Jacobson to have occurred at Exagoge 12.
The second of ‘Two Notes’, American Journal of Philology 98, no. 4 (Winter 1977): pp. 413–16.
The Exagoge of Ezekiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).