Quote:
Originally posted by Charlatan
1. I agree that Onan's sin was not giving his dead brother an hier... however the reason that was important was to keep a dwindling population up... Therefore in spilling his seed instead of giving his (dead) brother an hier he was breaking the rules...
Ultimately he would be accused of failing to obey God but in truth he was just breaking religious law... (more or less the same thing if you believe the priest speak for God).
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oooo, I was going to leave this thread but this caught my eye.
The
reason heirs were so necessary was because the ancient Hebrews had a very different notion of an 'afterlife', where a person (read MEN) only lived on through their male heirs.
Hence:
-if your BROTHER died without heirs, it was your responsibility to give them to him. Else you were guilty of damning your brother's 'soul' to eternal non-existance.
-if you were a homosexual MAN, you were guilty of condemning your OWN soul, because you would never have heirs.
By corollary, notice how NONE of these laws about heirs and homosexuality applied to WOMEN? This was because to the ancient Hebrews, women did not have 'souls' and were not fully persons.