An article in Slate today about birth-control made me think of that most unfairly reviled of biblical men, poor old Onan.

To make a long and quite deviant story (seriously, Dynasty has nothing on some of the early Bible stories) short, Judah had three sons. Er, the eldest, got married to Tamar and then got offed by God. Apparently he was ‘evil’ – God never really needed to come up with convincing excuses. According to tradition Tamar then married Onan, her late husband’s younger brother. Now, according to the law any children that Tamar had with Onan would be legally Er’s kid. Onan wasn’t particularly happy about that, but he still wanted to boink Tamar.

And lo, the withdrawal method was born.

And lo, God then killed Onan for being a smart-alek.

This led to a soap-opera storyline where Tamar pretended to a hooker and boinked Judah to get pregnant, then he was going to kill her, but then found out she was having his twins so he married her instead. I bet those kids were never encouraged to ask questions about the rest of the family.

However, that wasn’t what I was thinking about earlier. Onan has, for some reason, become synonymous with masturbation, playing the one man band, wooing Mrs Hand’s five lovely daughters, scaring the donkeys. (OK, I just made that last one up.) It seems unfair. Yes, he defied God and got himself smote for it, but is that any reason to spend the next millennia implying that he was an obsessive self-pleasurer whose hand no-one wanted to shake?

The link, apparently, is that he wasted semen in non-generative way by ‘spilling his seed’ on the sand. This is why the Catholic Church allows the Rhythm Method of contraception but not withdrawal, and doesn’t really approve of masturbation either. Basically, every semen is a potential life, so far as God is concerned every time you charm the one-eyed snake you commit mass-infanticide.

Eggs apparently, don’t count for so much in God’s eyes. That or He thinks periods are punishment enough.

Which brings us back to birth-control and the Slate article.

Welcome to my brain.

I quite like stories from the Bible. I don’t know why Sunday School never worked out for me.