levite

Yes, this is entirely true! The "sin of Onan" was not masturbation, it was his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage. Levirate (from the Latin levir, meaning "brother-in-law") was a sacred obligation in the time of the pre-Israelite patriarchs, and was a mitzvah (a commandment) in Biblical Judaism and until modern times in Rabbinic Judaism. If a married man died without having fathered children, his next-eldest brother had the responsibility to marry the widow and father children upon her, which children would be accounted legally as the descendants of his deceased brother. This was a key methodology of preserving genealogies in a clan-kinship society.

It was not until the Church Fathers were interpreting text for Christians that Onan's sin became associated incorrectly with masturbation.

Although the Torah states that a man who has emitted semen is ritually impure (that is, there are certain ritual functions he is unable to perform until he has washed himself and waited until sunset), there is certainly no prohibition in the Torah, nor any clear prohibition in the Talmud, forbidding masturbation. Such customary prohibitions as have arisen in traditional Judaism did so in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, largely in response to Christian social norms. There is no clear reason why masturbation ought to be forbidden, and thus it should be permitted. And if this is true of men, how much more so of women's masturbation, about which no traditional Jewish authority has ever even acknowledged its existence.

I personally believe that if God did not want you to masturbate, your hands would grow directly out of your shoulders.


*reaches for lube*

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)