onanism

Shevek, that's a very interesting post. I knew that onanism originally meant something different than what is usually meant today, but not the whole backstory. Fascinating. Thanks for posting it.

Yes. Sorry, I try not to waste my enire life here. So I put in my two penn'orth then go away and do something else. Then come back to see wassup.

As plethora correctly interpreted, you had written a statement of the form 'a was worse than b', implying that b was bad. I asked how b was bad.

Ah, I see. I wasn't implying that coitus interruptus is bad. I was more explaining why it isn't.

(Halakhically the Sin of Onan is still considered to be the spilling of seed though, AFAIK. The history I outlined could perhaps be used by a Rabbi to rule otherwise, but that is relatively unlikely to happen any time soon.)

I think he means that by saying something is worse than coitus interruptus, you're implying that coitus interruptus is bad to begin with. So why is it bad?

That's how I understood it, anyway.

Huh? I don't understand your question.

Why is coitus interruptus bad that something can be worse than it?

What Onan did was actually worse than coitus interruptus. Tamar had originally married Onan's brother, but the brother died before they produced an heir to carry the bother's name. Onan was supposed to marry Tamar (a Levirate marriage), give her a male child to carry on the deceased husband's name, and then divorce her. Tamar was a very attractive woman, so Onan was all too happy to enter the Levirate marriage, but he refused to give her a child because he wanted to keep having sex with her. Essentially he used her.

The reason onanism has come to mean "spilling seed" is that early medieval Jewish commentators, in enumerating the 613 commandments, did not want to remind their less-than-friendly Christian neighbors of the ancient, but no longer practiced institution of Levirate marriage, so they interpreted the passage to be a commandment against masturbation and coitus interruptus. Around this same time Jews discontinued the practice of polygamy.

coitus interruptus: 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.