What Was Onan's Crime?

Abstract

This article has had a long incubation. Three stimuli operating in different ways over a period of time account for its genesis: my exposure to anthropological writings on the Bible, my field work research in Israel, and my teaching of social anthropology in Swansea. Education in England, both secular and religious (by the latter I mean attendance at Hebrew classes outside of school from age seven to thirteen, culminating in my bar mitzvah), had exposed me to both the Old and New Testaments but had failed to raise any enthusiasm or interest on my part. Only when I began to study anthropology as an undergraduate did I begin to consider the biblical stories that I had heard in my childhood and youth. One of my first, serendipitous discoveries was Isaac Schapera's paper, “The Sin of Cain” (1955), in which he examines the first case of fratricide recorded in the Bible and postulates why Cain was not punished in the usual manner for engaging in homicide. He argues that precisely because Cain murdered his brother he evaded the usual penalty: he placed his group in the dilemma of compounding the loss of one of its members if it were to practise retaliation, nor could it agree to accept compensation since it would be in the position of accepting from its members and then paying out again to the same members. Into this impasse God enters, truly a deus ex machina, to resolve the problem. Schapera supports his argument by examples derived from ethnographic studies that recorded similar problems of homicide, especially fratricide.

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