After covert attempts to destroy the Israelites through crushing labor and secret instructions to the midwives failed, the Egyptian monarch escalates his campaign. Dropping all pretenses, he issues a public, direct, and merciless decree that mobilizes the entire Egyptian populace to commit mass murder. By operating under his formal royal title [אבן עזרא], the monarch signals the full deployment of his governmental authority, a stark shift from his earlier, behind-the-scenes political maneuvering [אלשיך, מלבי״ם]. This new mandate demanded immediate and strict enforcement, as a nationwide directive was inherently more difficult to control than a targeted order given to a select few midwives [העמק דבר].
The primary approach among commentators is that the king deputized the ordinary Egyptian masses, turning them into overseers and executioners [חזקוני, מלבי״ם, ביאור שטיינזלץ]. He calculated that while official state executioners might eventually balk at such a horrific task, an incited mob would act without mercy [אור החיים, רש״ר הירש]. The royal command was either a direct address to the citizens [רשב״ם] or a chilling instruction empowering Egyptians to force their Israelite neighbors to drown their own children [אור החיים, אלשיך].
A fundamental debate exists regarding exactly which infants were targeted. The straightforward reading, supported by several commentators, suggests the decree applied exclusively to Hebrew babies. From a practical standpoint, it defies logic for a monarch to annihilate his own population, especially considering this decree remained in effect over an extended period [שד״ל, אור החיים, נתינה לגר]. In this context, the order simply targeted any newborn infant [אבן עזרא, אבן עזרא הקצר], or perhaps specifically those delivered naturally without the aid of a midwife [קונטרס חיבה יתירה].
Conversely, another tradition frames this as a dramatic, one-day event driven by the king's astrologers. They foresaw that the savior of the Israelites was born that very day, yet they could not determine if the child was of Hebrew or Egyptian descent. This cosmic confusion occurred because Moses was destined to be raised by an Egyptian princess, despite being born to a Hebrew mother [כלי יקר, גור אריה]. Gripped by this uncertainty, the monarch issued a sweeping, temporary order to kill every single male child born that day, including native Egyptians [רש״י, הכתב והקבלה, שפתי חכמים]. Some suggest a historical backdrop for this approach: Egyptian kings traditionally gathered all children born on a royal prince's birthday to be raised alongside him in the palace, which seamlessly explains how Moses was later able to survive and integrate into the royal household [אם למקרא].
The specific choice of drowning the infants in the deepest waters to ensure no survival [אלשיך] was also rooted in astrological predictions. The royal seers predicted that the Israelite savior would ultimately face his downfall through water. Assuming this meant he would drown, they ordered the infants cast into the river. However, they tragically misread their own vision. The water in their prophecy did not represent the Egyptian river, but rather the Waters of Meribah in the wilderness, where Moses would eventually sin and face divine punishment [רש״י, תורה תמימה, צאינה וראינה]. Alternatively, the astrologers may have foreseen an entire nation drowning and mistakenly assumed it was the Israelites, when in fact, the vision foretold the Egyptian army's future destruction in the Red Sea [חזקוני].
While the boys were condemned, the girls were explicitly kept alive. On a practical level, women did not pose a military threat [הדר זקנים], and the astrological vision of doom by water only applied to males [חזקוני]. More insidiously, this was a calculated strategy of assimilation. The Egyptians intended for the surviving Hebrew girls to grow up, marry Egyptian men, and seamlessly expand the local population [העמק דבר, רלב״ג]. This represented a decree of spiritual annihilation, designed to erase the Israelite identity entirely—a threat considered even more devastating than physical death [חומש קה״ת].
Ultimately, the narrative concludes with profound poetic justice. The very monarch who orchestrated this ruthless campaign inadvertently rescued and raised the architect of his own empire's downfall. This deep irony mirrors a later biblical tragedy where King David raised Absalom in his own home, only for his son to rise up and attempt to destroy him [קיצור בעל הטורים].