Sodomy laws

And then there was Onan - who got a bad rap in the Old Testament for masturbating - although it was more likely early withdrawal for contraceptive purposes. Here's the Wikipedia quote on it:


Onanism - From the biblical name Onan: In the Book of Genesis, Onan, son of Judah, in fulfillment of the laws of levirate marriage was to impregnate his brother Er's widow, Tamar, in order to raise offspring from the union in his brother's name. In order to avoid raising descendants for his late brother, however, Onan spilled his semen on the ground when he went in to his brother's wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother. (Genesis 38:9). Thus the word Onanism was coined, meaning ejaculating outside the vagina, or masturbation (because this also spills semen, rather than using it for procreation).
 
Yeah, prudes twisted the meaning of the Onan/Tamar story to make it about masturbation, when it was just about the requirement to marry your dead brother's wife and give her a child. As I recall, Tamar then disguised herself as a whore and got her father in law to fuck her instead. She was pretty tricky, and kept some of his belongings, which later implicated him.

There are some fun and funny stories in the old Bible!


There is no such thing as "underage" sex in the Bible, or in Judaism for some time afterward. There were rabbis debating the how-to's of fucking a wife who was pre-adolescent in the Talmud. (Would she be "clean" enough for sex, if she hadn't menstruated, which required the mikvah, the ritual bath a woman must perform after her period to regain purity?) Pretty shocking stuff, these old guys, scholars and lawyers, openly discussing the proper procedure for fucking a pre-adolescent girl, like it's the most normal accepted thing in the world. Not a thing wrong with marrying a literal child and having sex with her, just make sure she'd clean enough so that she doesn't offend Yahweh when you put it in her.

Homosexual or lesbian sex is barely mentioned in the OT. And even when it is mentioned briefly in the NT, scholars agree it was not that the act itself was so despicable, but that it was common in the surrounding Greek/Roman world, and the "Jews" of Judah/Judea and Israel/Galilee had a different way of going. They were a struggling tribe, a tiny nation surrounded by giant empires always. So breeding and procreating as much as possible was paramount. It was all about having as many offspring as possible.

And from that we got the condemnation against same gender sex we still struggle with today all across the world.
 
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