...on Sodom and Onan

I had to write this against someone who had misinterpreted Hezekiel and Genesis on why God punished the city of Sodom and Onan, the son of Judah.

Hezekiel 16:49 Iniquitas Sodomae, sororis tue fuit saturitas panis...

next verse goes on to pride and ABOMINATION IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD.

In the law of Moses abomination in the sight of the Lord could mean two kinds of sin: incest and sins against nature. Also sacrificing children to Moloch, I recall.

From the KIND of gangrape the Sodomites were about to commit (Genesis 19?) it is clear that they were guilty of Sodomy, which the Prophet Hezekiel calls abomination in the sight of the Lord. Habitually. Otherwise they would not have thought of raping two strange men as the angels appeared to them.

In a Swedish Bible translation the relevant verse about Onan says that God slew him for what he DID - which was coitus interruptus ending in the spilling of his semen. That act is itself an abomination, whether a violation of levirate be involved or not. As I said, this was before the law of Moses, before the inculcation and divine sanction of that law of levirate. Onan wasn't disobeying the law of Moses in refusing the duties of levirate marriage, but the orders of his father Judah. Your words on the beliefs of Old Testament Hebrews are not recorded in Scripture or oral Tradition, they are merely a product of modern scholarship, unless you can give patristic authority for it. You also imply that God would have punished severely and openly something that was just impious according to the false imagination of a people not knowing the truth - which is how you imagine the old Hebrews. But that is unworthy of God.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob certainly believed that they would live - or how could God, who is God of the living, not of the dead, be their God once they had died? If they did not believe Christ would save them they were not Christians nor were they saved. But they were saved because they were Christians. FurthermoreAbraham showed his belief in the resurrection in his readiness to sacrificeIsaac and still believing him to be the son of promise, through whom he would befather of an innumerable posterity, father of Christ. Isaac was therefore given mystically back to him from the dead, and a faultless animal victim was sacrificed in his stead. This sacrifice is commemorated in the Canon of the Mass.

Now Jacob was the father of Judah and grandfather of Er, Onan and eventually the sons of Thamar. The false idea the saduccees were later guilty of can hardly have been relevant then.

You are wrong, VLinvictus.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Envoyé : 13/08/2002 12:44