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How an obscure Bible character affected the church’s stance on birth control and masturbation.
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Most doctors have some embarrassing stories. Relevant to this chapter, I once had an elderly woman confide in me that sometimes in the bath she would use her finger to stimulate herself, and she was afraid she might have caused an infection “down there.” It’s not the most comfortable thing talking to a grandmother figure about masturbation and its consequences. But that leads right into this post.
Abraham had a grandson named Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. He fathered twelve sons by four women, each becoming the founder of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. One of the sons was Judah. Judah is particularly significant because the tribe named for him was one that survived the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, suffered between approximately 740 and 590 BCE. The tribe and land of Judah gave rise to the term “Jew.” The other significance of Judah is that the New Testament claims that Jesus is one of his descendants. Genesis 38 gives us some insight into Judah’s family life, and it ain’t pretty. (See post #8 for details.) This chapter is one of the most interesting and spiciest chapters in the Bible. I doubt it is often covered in children’s Sunday School, and I suspect most adults have not read it either. Take a few moments to read it, at least the first ten verses. I’ll wait…
As background, there was an ancient custom that if the oldest son in a family died without children then his brother was expected to marry the widow and have children with her so that the brother’s family line would not die out. This is called “levirate marriage,” from the Latin “levir” meaning “husband’s brother.” This was incorporated into the Jewish law: read Deuteronomy 25:5-10. I particularly like the part where the widow gets to spit in the face of her brother-in-law if he refuses. It is also interesting that it does not say what to do if the widow does not want to marry her brother-in-law: I suppose she had no choice, since the intent was to continue her late husband’s family line and her opinion didn’t matter (she’s just an incubator, after all).
Anyway, this sets up a curious situation within the family of Judah.
Judah marries a Canaanite woman (for shame!) and has a son, Er. Er “was evil in the sight of Yahweh” so God kills him. The next brother in line is named Onan. So Judah tells Onan to do his duty, “and raise up a child for your brother.” But Onan “knew that the child would not be his.” Recall that the older brother inherited the father’s estate and became the patriarch of the family, so Onan probably realized that any child through his brother’s wife would supplant him as next in line. (I realize these stories are likely legendary, but they are based on historical situations and likely reflect actual attitudes of people in such situations.) “So, when he had relations with his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground so that he would not give a child to his brother.” Coitus interruptus, in other words.
Well, this was displeasing to Yahweh, so He kills Onan, too. Wow, I think that’s worse than having the widow spit in your face! Mind you, this is long before there was any formal law as defined in Deuteronomy, so this seems like a rather harsh judgment on Onan, especially considering what Judah does later in the chapter with that widow, yet lives to tell about it.
This minor story (10 verses) led to two misguided conclusions. The first is that this story represents God’s disapproval of birth control. Onan was trying to avoid a pregnancy, and so God killed him. Therefore, God does not want us to use birth control. I do not see how this is a valid conclusion. There is a story in Numbers 15 of a man gathering wood on the Sabbath Day, and God tells Moses to have the man stoned to death. Does that mean that God disapproves of gathering wood? No, the problem was working on the Sabbath; that was the law he violated. Likewise, in Onan’s case he was violating what they considered to be an important family creed, necessary for their system of family descent and inheritance, important enough it eventually became law. That was his “sin.” To extend this story to the practice of birth control in general outside the context of this law seems like an unjustified reach. And this idea is not dead. Some years ago I was talking to a Christian friend and the subject of birth control came up, and he cited the Onan story as an argument against it. In fact, Martin Luther and John Calvin, the two most influential Protestant Reformers both wrote about Onan and used his story as justification for condemning coitus interruptus as a form of birth control:
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“Onan must have been a malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. This is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest or adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a Sodomitic sin. For Onan goes into her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed.”
Luther’s Works 7:20-21
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Luther said it was a “most disgraceful sin” for Onan to not impregnate his sister-in-law.[1] He does go on to explain that his main objection is that Onan was refusing to care for his “brother’s” children, comparing it to caring for orphans. But Luther has it backwards: Onan was not being told to raise his brother’s children as if they were his own; he was being told to raise his own children as if they were his brother’s. That’s a significant difference. I don’t think objecting to this should be a capital offense. If Luther is making a point about the magnanimity of caring for others’ children, like orphans, then I applaud that sentiment, but this is not the story to use in making that point, and his comments misled others to condemn birth control in general. Luther recognized, as did Paul, that some men have the gift for celibacy, and Paul even praises this as the best lifestyle for a Christian (1st Corinthians 7:7, 8). So, it is noble for Jesus and Paul and Catholic priests not to father and care for even a single child, but it is a “disgraceful,” even “Sodomitic” sin[2] for me and my wife to simply limit the number of children we have through birth control? Not sure I follow the logic that leads people from Onan’s story to a condemnation of birth control in general, but Luther and Calvin joined the Roman Catholic Church in using the story of Onan to justify their anti-contraceptive stance. In 1930 Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical known as Casti connubii which cites the Onan story to support the church’s prohibition of birth control. And thus the little story of Onan became a significant influence on Western society’s thinking about reproductive rights, i.e., birth control.
The other misunderstanding of the story is that it represents a prohibition of “onanism,” an old euphemism for masturbation. Read the story – it is coitus interruptus, not masturbation. But that did not stop the sex-squeamish church from seizing upon it as a way to condemn masturbation. Luther and Calvin are on record as regarding masturbation as a sin. Luther viewed it as an aberration caused by frustrated sexual desires, stating in his commentary on the apostle Paul’s 1st Corinthians chapter 7: “Some among them suffer so severely that they masturbate. All these ought to be in the married estate.” His solution for onanism is marriage, of course. Note that in 1st Corinthians 7:1 Paul says it is good for a man not to touch a woman, but he doesn’t say anything about a man touching himself.
And the medical community, heavily influenced by religion, jumped on board. There was a popular book written in 1760 by a Swiss physician names Samuel-Auguste Tissot, entitled “Treatise On The Diseases Caused By Onanism.” It was translated and published in America in 1832 and is available online if you search for it. Although he was a Calvinist Protestant he also served as an advisor to the Vatican, and was highly respected in his day, even achieving recognition by Napoleon. In light of today’s more enlightened views his claims now seem comical. He ascribes all kinds of maladies to masturbation, including but not limited to: memory loss, hysteria, confusion, pimples, vertigo, cough, constipation, diarrhea, impotence, seizures, gout and even death. Imagine being a teenager with a bad case of acne in those days – what would people think?! “We know what you’ve been up to!” Think you were self-conscious about coughing during the Covid pandemic? Imagine what people thought back in the day if you came out of your bedroom coughing!
So, poor Onan’s name also gets applied to the “sin” of masturbation. On the positive side, more recently some churches have come to see it as a natural and common habit, not an unnatural sin. Statistics vary a fair amount: I’ve seen estimates that from 60 to 80% of people masturbate. The old joke is an exaggeration: “98% of people masturbate, and the other 2% are lying.” As for being an aberration, which is a questionable term to use for such a common human behavior, even our fellow primates masturbate; some even will use appropriately shaped objects to do so.[3] So, some churches are changing their stances, but they are still in the minority.
One final thought on the Onan story. There are many laws in the Bible, including trivial ones like how to trim your beard (Lev. 21:5) or what material you can use in your clothes (Lev. 19:19), and many laws about sex. Yet there is no law against masturbation. It would have been easy enough for God to say, “Thou shalt not sexually stimulate yourself.” Likewise with birth control. God could have said, “Thou shalt not use any measures to prevent pregnancy.” But no such laws were given. So, puritanical church leaders have had to look for stories like Onan to use as justification for their restrictions. They take a story about an ancient custom we no longer follow (levirate marriage) and twist it to fit their personal beliefs, and then claim it is what God said. No, God did not so say. He could have, but He did not.
Onan is one of those cases where extrapolations of Bible stories prejudiced by personal beliefs lead to ridiculous and harmful ideas. But beware: Onan got smote. Smote dead! So, let that be a lesson to you!
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Thinking exercises:
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1. If you are a wife, how would you feel about your husband having sex with his widowed sister-in-law to get her pregnant?
2. Masturbation does not cause pregnancy or disease (despite Tissot’s assertions), and there is no specific law against it in the Bible, so why do you think the church so commonly regards it as a sin?
3. Why do religious authorities say that celibacy, in which no children are born, is honorable, but birth control which merely limits the number of children is wrong?
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[1] I find this most bizarre, especially since Leviticus 18:16 specifically includes your brother’s wife in the prohibitions against incest. I guess once your brother is dead she is fair game?
[2] I assume he means a perverse sexual sin worthy of God’s destruction, like Sodom was destroyed.
[3] Different by primatologist Frans De Waal, W. W. Norton & Company, 2022, is an entertaining read on how studying our fellow primates helps us understand gender and sex issues.