The Greek version of the Psalms of Solomon contains a number of genitives in the reverse of the order found in the other surviving version (Syriac)--and usually also in the reverse of the order that would seem intuitively logical to a native English speaker. For instance:
8:13 ἐν ἀφέδρω αἵματος ἐμίαναν τὰς θυσίας “with menstruation of blood they stained the sacrifices” (Syriac “... blood of menstruation...”)
16:1 παρὰ μικρὸν ὠλίσθησα ἐν καταφθορᾶ ὑπνου “I little short of slipped in the corruption of sleep” (Syriac “... sleep of corruption”)
17:13 ἐν ὀργῆ κάλλους αὐτοῦ ἐξαπέστειλεν αὐτὰ ἕως ἐπὶ δυσμῶν "in the anger of his beauty he sent them away to the west" (Syriac "... beauty of his anger...")
There are quite a number of other instances, but for the sake of simplicity I'll confine my attention to the above three. I've quoted them as they're found in the extant manuscripts (Rahlfs emends some of them).
Of course I don't think "reversed genitive" is a correct description of this phenomenon, but I'll use it for simplicity till the true explanation is uncovered.
Questions:
1) Is there any one explanation that would fit all three of the above Greek genitives? It's easy to think of different explanations for the different instances--e.g. some of them could be epexegetical, others could be textual errors (cf. Rahlfs), etc. But since this phenomenon appears to be a recurring habit of the Greek translator, I'm wondering if it has some unitary explanation.
2) Can anyone think of seemingly-reversed genitives in other relevant Greek texts (esp. the NT)? The best I can recall at the moment is ἐν μηρῷ σαρκός (Sir 19:12), which is usually interpreted as equivalent to "in the flesh of the thigh" (so e.g. RV, RSV, NJB). But I'm not sure that that's a particularly good example.
3) If this is a unitary phenomenon, is there a discussion of it in any of the standard grammars? I've looked in KG, Schwyzer, Smyth, Robertson, MHT, and BDF without success.
