Onan the Barbarian
Kathy is due for another knee replacement. The doctor has advised her to keep pressure off that knee as much as possible until he can get her to the operating table. One of the ways Kathy is following the doctor’s orders involves sitting in a recliner, feet up, ice pack in place, while watching the birds trash our front porch. The greedy little rascals have made such a mess of the birdseed in the feeders that I was reminded of Dorothy Parker’s pet bird. She named her bird Onan, because he scattered his seed on the ground. I mentioned this to Kathy.
She failed to see the humor in Parker’s witticism.
I suppose the Book of Genesis isn’t very high on anyone’s reading list today. I re-read it a few years ago in conjunction with an online course offered by Hillsdale College. Hillsdale offers a variety of free courses online, and I have taken several: one on mathematics and logic, one on chemistry, one on the Second World War. I was at loose ends one weekend, saw the course on the Book of Genesis, and decided to give it a try. It is in this book that we find the story of Onan.
It is actually the story of Onan’s father, Judah, and Tamar, the widow of his eldest son Er. Onan makes a very brief appearance in the tale. It is a strange story, for two reasons. First, it deals with an ancient custom, the levirate marriage: the compulsory marriage of a widow to the brother of her dead husband. The second aspect of this story that is a bit strange is the fact that the author plops this story down smack dab in the middle of the story of Joseph. It has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph. It is a distraction.
Back to the tale. Judah had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Judah arranged a marriage between Er and a Canaanite woman named Tamar. But Er was, well, let’s take it from the source: “And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him.” At this point Judah directed Onan, the second son, to engage in a levirate marriage. It was his job to marry Tamar and produce children that would not be his heirs, but would, instead, be the lawful heirs of the dead brother, Er. This did not tickle Onan’s fancy. If he produced children, he wanted them to be his heirs, not his brother’s. Apparently he did not object to playing “hide the zakila” with Tamar: he just refused to produce and rear children that legally would not be his. Let us go again to the source: “And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.” There it is: a biblical reference to coitus interruptus.
Needless to say, this did not please the Lord, who gave Onan the same fate as Er.
Judah didn’t know why his two older sons had been killed. He thought that Tamar was up to no good. He was required to give his third and final son, Shelah, to Tamar in marriage, but he was afraid that Tamar would kill Shelah, so he stalled.
Tamar tired of waiting. Some time after the death of Judah’s wife, Tamar approached him, disguised as a prostitute, and convinced him to sleep with her, for a price: his signet, bracelets, and staff. He did, and as a result, she conceived twins. When Tamar began to show, she was saved from death when she produced the signet, bracelets, and staff that Judah gave her. Thus the old man did the job his two elder sons could not do, and in sleeping with his daughter-in-law, produced sons that under normal circumstances would have been his grandsons.
Back to Onan. His name is now enshrined in the term “Onanism”. The original definition was, of course, coitus interruptus, but over time the term has picked up an additional definition or two. My 1979 Webster’s lists the second and third definitions as “2: MASTURBATION 3: SELF-GRATIFICATION”. (I have no idea why Webster put these two definitions in capital letters, while the first definition is not.)
The name “Onan” is not a name to give to your son, nor is it a name to give to a company. And yet there is a company named Onan that produces electrical generators. I remember seeing the name on a building next to a runway at some airport and thinking to myself that were I the CEO of that outfit, I would surely change the name.
The thing I find most interesting is how the punishment for onanism has changed over the generations. For Onan’s generation, the punishment was death. For my generation, the punishment was blindness!