My favorite part is that if you actually read this story it’s not even about masturbation, it’s about how shitty it is to try and rules-lawyer your way out of doing the right thing.

Onan’s brother died and left a childless widow. In Jewish culture at that time, as a widow, she would’ve needed a son to collect the inheritance / be taken care of, etc. The workaround (in lieu of not being misogynists given that these were ye olden times) was that your brother in law would knock you up and that kid would legally count as your dead husband’s for the purposes of inheritance.

But Onan thinks he’s reeeaaaal clever and figures if she just magically can’t get pregnant, he could just keep all that land, tents, horses, and whatever else. So he just keeps pulling out, she never gets pregnant and figures he’s home free and puts his brother’s widow out on the street to become a prostitute. There’s some specific symbolic way that he gets his divine comeuppance for all this but I can never remember that part.

This was just the example my childhood pastor used to like using when he explained the problems with just letting someone else tell you what the Bible means instead of reading it for yourself. The man was very educated and gave a lot of sermons on the historical cultural context of a lot of the texts. In fact I’m pretty sure all of my childhood pastors had Master’s degrees.

This is also the same guy that founded the interfaith community in my city to promote cultural exchange and coordinated charity efforts. Basically Fred Rogers’ spiritual twin was my childhood pastor; if they weren’t alive at the same time it would have me believing in reincarnation (they even looked similar and were even both Presbyterian).

The man had a congregation in the hundreds and he knew the name of every person in every family, what their jobs were, what their kids were studying in college, and if they had any sick relatives, and would stand by the gate at the end of every service shaking every single persons hand and chatting about that stuff for a minute or two each. When my brother died he was on our doorstep within an hour of the cops notifying us. Regardless of how my personal spiritual beliefs have waxed or waned at various points it took me a looong time to understand how someone in that position could hurt people through either malice or incompetence.

discharge genetic material

Could you not argue that a woman is doing this every time she has her period?

BTW, masturbation is called Onanieren in German… a bit imprecise, biblically.

I mean, these were people barely out of the caves trying to populate a nation. Mainstream religion has always been political propaganda, and kind of intentionally missing the point.

keep in mind, that Onan, levirate marriages weren’t about love or anything like that.

Like most (all?) cultures at the time, women were property, and couldn’t own property.

Technically, Er’s firstborn son would have inherited everything and then “taken care of” everyone else. Or rather, Tamar, would, on the son’s behalf. but Er got smote by god for being a particular kind of dick before he had a first born son.

So in typical religious fruitcake fashion, instead of fixing the original problem- that Tamar had no way of inheriting anything or supporting her self- they decided the obvious solution was for the brother-in-law to get the widow pregnant.

of course Tamar was the same age as the third brother; who needed to grow up a bit before she could marry him… (ew, right?) so instead she gets sent back to her own family and- eventually- becomes a camp follower of Judah’s… and, ah. yeah.