And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him. And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. 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. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also.
-- Genesis 38: 7-10 (KJV) As a favored son of God's chosen patriarch, Jacob (a.k.a. Israel), Judah should have been sitting pretty. But in fact his family life is miserable. Judah's first son, Er, turns out to be "wicked in the sight of the Lord"; so God kills him. Judah's second son, Onan, likewise "displease[s] the Lord," so God kills him, too. But at least in Onan's case we're told why.
You might think Onan's sin was "onanism," an eponymous English term for masturbation. But such is not exactly the case. True, Onan "spills his seed on the ground," but he doesn't do it all by himself. Jacob has put him on the spot, by means of a peculiar tribal law: though Er is dead, if Er's brother impregnates Er's widow (Tamar), then any resulting son will be taken as Er's. It's bizarre enough that Onan could father Er's son if he wanted to. What's more, since primogeniture (succession through the first-born son) was of supreme importance at this stage of Israelite society, he's compelled by duty to do so.
But Onan, rebelling at the idea that his own child will be credited to Er, tries to pull a fast one. He does begin to perform his duty with Tamar -- several times, in fact. But, each time, he withdraws at the crucial moment. It is this outrageous shirking of duty that so displeases Yahweh, not the method Onan uses to spill his seed -- which is technically coitus interruptus.
Nonetheless, when "onanism" first appeared in English (in the eighteenth century), it was quaintly defined as "the crime of self-pollution." Occasionally, the term has been employed with slightly more fidelity to the Bible; A. K. Gardner, for example, referred in his 1892 work Conjugal Relations to "the best-calculated refinements of conjugal onanism." In a more recent development, "onanism," once virtually restricted to private activities by men, has been given wider application, as when George Steiner refers in Language and Silence (1967) to some "recent university experiment in which faculty wives agreed to practice onanism in front of the researchers' cameras.""
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