What little time I have spent on line this week ended up with a discussion of that poor guy in the book of Genesis, Onan! You can read the discussion here.
It actually started out as a discussion of Quiver Full theology and drifted over to Onan. Essentially any discussion that touches on artificial contraception, particularly with sola scriptura Christians who are trying to discern whether contracepting is sinful or not, has to eventually hit the verses on Onan. It’s a natural progression. I chuckled to myself when Mrs. Swoffer et al become frustrated when it turns that way (she shut the comments down), but how can it not?
Anyway, back in November I linked to this article by Rev. William Harrison on Onan. Father Harrison had 5 points that I found to be particularly persuasive in the use of Onan as the scriptural argument against contraception and contraceptive acts.
1. The strong use of the language in Genesis 38: 9 and 10
9. Onan, however, knew that the descendants would not be counted as his; so whenever he had relations with his brother’s widow, he wasted his seed on the ground, to avoid contributing offspring for his brother.
10
What he did greatly offended the LORD, and the LORD took his life too
Father Harrison says:
1. Indeed, a further problem faces this conventional modern reading of the passage. If simple refusal to give legal offspring to his deceased brother were, according to Genesis 38, Onan’s only offence, it seems extremely unlikely that the text would have spelt out the crass physical details of his contraceptive act (cf. v. 9).
A reader on Mrs. Swoffer’s blog tried to say that this verse is equally as explicit:
Gen 30:16 And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night.
I disagree. The chapter 38 verse is much more explicit. Father Harris explains:
And apart from the verse we are considering, the Bible’s only fully explicit mention of a genital act (the voluntary emission of seed) is in a prophetical and allegorical context wherein Israel’s infidelity to Yahweh is being denounced scathingly in terms of the shameless lust of a harlot (Ez. 23: 20).
What always stuns me about the Onan story, but doesn’t seem to phase pro-Contraception Christians that I have met, is that what Onan did OFFENDED GOD! To be offended to me, means to have your feelings hurt and perhaps angry for being exposed to something obscene. That alone tells me that it was more than the deceit or the lie, because deceit already happened from the very beginning of Genesis with Adam and Eve, through to Isaac and Jacob! This offense was something more – and that something more was the contraceptive act.
2. Father Harrison’s second point is also a clear sign that the offense committed was not merely not following through with the Leverite law.
Per Father Harrison:
Was Onan perhaps slain merely for refusing to give offspring to his deceased brother’s wife, as most contemporary exegetes maintain? In answering these questions one must take cognizance of the following significant fact: the penalty subsequently laid down in the law of Moses for a simple refusal to comply with the levirate marriage precept was only a relatively mild public humiliation in the form of a brief ceremony of indignation. The childless widow, in the presence of the town elders, was authorized to remove her uncooperative brother-in-law’s sandal and spit in his face for his refusal to marry her. He was then supposed to receive an uncomplimentary nick-name – “the Unshod.” But since he nonetheless became sole owner of his deceased brother’s house and goods, it is evident that his offence was scarcely considered a serious or criminal one – much less one deserving of death. Death, however, is precisely what Onan deserved, according to Genesis. It follows that those who say his only offence was infringement of the levirate marriage custom need to explain why such an offence was punished by the Lord so much more drastically in the case of Onan than than it subsequently was under the Mosaic law. If anything, we would tend to expect the contrary: i.e., that after the law was formalized as part of the Deuteronomic code its violation might be chastised more severely than before, not more mildly.
A commenter at Mrs. Swoffer’s blog stated:
You missed the “or” part – he agreed to take Tamar as his wife, and then refused to give her the heir. Doing this, he not only deprived her of the heir, he avoided the humiliation of the penalty of the Law.
I didn’t miss it. The humiliation was getting your sandal pulled off and being spat at, but it is clear from Father Harrison’s analysis that that wasn’t even considered a big crime. The main point is that the penalty for just breaking the Leverite law was not death. Yet Onan, receives death – instant death.
Protestants and others who insist that Onan’s crime was deceit, or refusing to pass on the line – anything but contraception, never really explain that, and it didn’t get an adequate explanation from the discussion on Mrs. Swoffer’s blog either.
3. The modern interpretation of the verse that some use to say Onan was killed for something other than contraception, does not take into account the culture and the times of the early Israelites.
Father Harrison:
It should be remembered also that we are here dealing here with a culture which so abhorred that other form of “wasting the seed” – the homosexual act – that it prescribed the death penalty for this offence. In the light of this and the other factors we have considered, I submit that it would be not only exegetically unwarranted, but quite anachronistic, to suggest that the Genesis author, in line with the ‘political correctness’ of late twentieth-century Western liberalism, would have taken a relaxed, indulgent view of Onan’s method of preventing conception – his “spill[ing] the seed on the ground.” We should note also the parallel between the description of homosexual acts as a “wicked” or “abominable” thing in the Leviticus texts and the similar qualification of what Onan did in Genesis 38: 10.
Somehow a commenter misses that point completely and throws in this Red Herring
are you saying that the only reason that God considered a man laying with a man is an abomination is that seed is not spilled for procreation? Does that mean lesbians are ok?
The purpose of Father Harrison’s point is to illustrate that to the early Israelites, the deliberate sexual excitement and ejaculation for the purpose of pleasure but not procreation, (Onanism, homosexuality) were viewed similarly as “abominable.” One can’t look at the Onan passage with the other scriptures and miss that it is viewed similarly to other passes that are called “wicked” or “abominable.”
4. Lastly, the modern interpretation would have us believe that Onan’s sin was of the heart or mind. He was “deceitful” or he “refused” children to his brother. But the text is clear that is an action that got Onan in trouble. He “did” something.
Father Harrison:
Moreover, in the view of revisionist exegetes, Onan’s sin is presented here as being essentially one of omission. We are asked to believe that, according to Genesis, Onan committed no sinful act; rather, that his sin was to refrain from acting appropriately toward his deceased brother because of some sort of selfish interior disposition. But why, in that case, does the text describe Onan’s sin as a positive action (“he did a detestable thing”)? Coming directly after the author has mentioned what is certainly an outward act (i.e., “spilling the seed”), these words in v. 10 plainly indicate a causal link between that sexual act as such and the wrath and punishment of God.
After all, it is not as if the Old Testament vocabulary was lacking in concepts or words to express sins of interior attitude, when that is the kind of sin the authors had in mind. The “heart” of man – whether righteous or wicked – is a rich and important term of moral reference in Hebrew anthropology, and to the extent that Onan’s fault was indeed this is of omission, such lack of piety toward his dead brother would have been an example of what the Israelites called “hardness of heart” (cf. Ex. 7: 13, 22; 8:15; Ps 95:7f), perhaps motivated at bottom by personal vanity (not wanting to father any child who would not be legally his), or even by that sheer covetousness for his brother’s property which was forbidden in the Tenth Commandment and in numerous other Old Testament passages.
Once again, however, we must ask what evidence there is that this degree of “hardness of heart” would have been seen in Onan’s time as sufficient to merit death. If today’s revisionist exegetes are right in claiming that “spilling the seed on the ground” is not, per se, censured in this text, it would follow that even if Onan had simply declined to marry Tamar and so abstained from intimacy of any kind with her, this complete abstinence would have been viewed by the Genesis author as no less offensive to God than the course of action which Onan chose in reality – and which earned him a divine death sentence! But we have already pointed out that such a conclusion leaves unexplained the relative leniency of Deuteronomy 25 in penalizing such offences against the levirate marriage custom.
On the other hand if, as Judæo-Christian tradition has always insisted, “wasting the seed” by intrinsically sterile types of genital action violates that natural law to which all men, Jew and Gentile alike, have always had access by virtue of their very humanness, (cf. Rom. 1: 26-27; 2: 14), this will explain perfectly why Onan’s sexual action in itself would be presented in Scripture as meriting a most severe divine judgment: it was a perverted act – one of life-suppressing lust. Indeed, over and above its prohibition by natural law, such deliberately sterilized pleasure-seeking could well have been discerned as a form of contravening one of the few divine precepts which already in that pre-Sinai tradition had been solemnly revealed – and repeated – in positive, verbal form: “Increase and multiply” (Gen. 1: 27-28; 9: 1).
5. Lastly, modernists tend and I would say Christians who tend to “lean on their own understanding” without bothering to do their homework first, allow the views and morals of this culture to pollute their understanding of this passage.
until the early years of this century, when some exegetes began to approach the text with preconceptions deriving from the sexual decadence of modern Western culture and its exaggerated concern for ‘over-population.’ Sad to say, these preconceptions have since become entrenched as a new exegetical ‘orthodoxy’ which can no longer see even a trace of indignation in this passage of Scripture against intrinsically sterile forms of genital activity as such.
I have yet to meet a pro-contraception Protestant or Catholic for that matter, who can handle each one of those points in a compelling and persuasive manner. It didn’t happen over at Mrs. Swoffer’s either.
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