Amanda Marcotte: No, Porn Addiction Is Not Really A Thing

[jberryhill]

88. Onan's sin was not masturbation

His sin was deliberately failing to impregnate his sister-in-law after his brother died.

The ever so wholesome family values and marriage laws of the Bible require that if your brother has died without children, then you have to bang his wife until she's pregnant.

Instead, Onan "spilled his seed upon the ground". Now, aside from the obviously uncarpeted bedroom, suggesting she was not much of a homemaker, Onan's reasons for doing that aren't clear. Either, he did not want the responsibility to a nephew being raised as his dead brother's child, or he figured that he wouldn't be able to keep having sex with her once his duty was fulfilled.

But it's not simply justified to remember him as Onan the Masturbarian when it seems from the text that he simply have been withdrawing and was not, shall we say, much of a pre-cummer.

Or maybe one or the other one of them was simply infertile, and in the reproductive genius of their day they simply concluded that he was "failing to plant his seed".

Who knows? But the takeaway for me has been that, through both of my brother's childless marriages, I have continued to wish him good health and long life.