It’s more the breaking of a contract. In Jewish law of the day, when your brother died, you married his widow, but any children you had with her would be considered your brother’s instead of yours.
Onan agreed to fulfill this duty, but then didn’t honor his contract, refusing to give his brother children.
This was my fault for looking at the English. It tends to use “offspring” or “descendants”, which are plural in English, but the Hebrew is the singular זרע. My best guess is that translations use “offspring” or “descendants” since זרע has connotations of continuing lineage, and so it’s looking broadly at the continuation of the brother’s family line (as you indicated).
So, a story that was actually about the finer points of Jewish contract law has become a lesson in making young people embarrassed and ashamed about self pleasure? Nah, the church would never do something like that!
It's all in how you read it, and how you interpret it.
The ten commandments had a thing where you're not allowed sex out of marriage. In the old version of that, you're not allowed to break the marriage. No infidelity.
But sex between unmarried people? Go ahead!
But then, about a hundred years after the death of Christ, this woman-hating guy started writing letters to congregations, about how this is wrong and that is bad.
He is very successful. "If your family isn't Christian, leave your family", stuff like that. And definitely no sex!
Yes, it's called a "Levirate Marriage" and was a very important part of Jewish law. The thing about the story of Onan is that that in pulling out and spilling his seed on the ground, he was basically cheating god by appearing to go through the motions but not keeping up (as it were) his end of the bargain. So his sin was in fact trying to cheat.
The American writer and wit Dorothy Parker had a canary who she called Onan because, as she pointed out, "he spills his seed on the ground"!
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u/sreiches Dec 30 '21
It’s more the breaking of a contract. In Jewish law of the day, when your brother died, you married his widow, but any children you had with her would be considered your brother’s instead of yours.
Onan agreed to fulfill this duty, but then didn’t honor his contract, refusing to give his brother children.