Genesis 38:9

Summary

Genesis 38:9 narrates that Onan, aware that any child produced would not count as his own offspring, acted to prevent conception whenever he had intercourse with his brother's widow. The verse explains his motive (the offspring's legal status) and describes a repeated action aimed at avoiding fulfillment of the levirate expectation of providing offspring to his deceased brother.

Key words

• yeda' ("he knew", H3045) — qal verb opening the verse; establishes Onan's awareness as the narrative's starting point.
• shichet ("he spoiled/destroyed", H7843) — piel (intensive) sequential perfect; the intensive stem marks a deliberate, forceful action rather than a simple or accidental one.
• zera' ("offspring/seed", H2233H) — masculine singular noun, appearing twice (lines 10, 26); the term denotes both biological semen and descendants, allowing the wordplay embedded in the verse.
• bilti ("not", H1115) — construct with the infinitive netan ("to give", H5414G), forming the purpose clause "so as not to give."
• artza ("toward the ground", H0776H + directional he) — the directional suffix indicates motion/direction toward the ground, the target of the action described by shichet.

What the text says

The verse opens with vayeda' ("and he knew") introducing a causal/explanatory clause marked by ki ("that/because", H3588A): Onan understands that lo yihyeh haZara' — "the offspring would not be his" — using the imperfect yihyeh (H1961) to express an ongoing legal reality rather than a single event. The construction vehayah im ("and it was, if...") that follows is a standard Hebrew pattern for describing habitual or repeated action: literally "and it happened, whenever he came in to his brother's wife." This iterative sense is carried by the sequential perfects ba' ("he went/came", H0935G) and shichet ("he destroyed", H7843), which in this narrative chain describe repeated rather than single occurrences.

The verb shichet is piel, an intensive stem, but the Hebrew itself does not specify the exact physical action — it says only that he "destroyed/spoiled" artza, "toward the ground." The purpose is stated with the construction lebilti netan zera' ("so as not to give offspring"), an infinitive construct governed by bilti, expressing intended prevention.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew verb shichet ("he spoiled/destroyed") is rendered more explicitly in the LXX as exechéen ("he poured out") and in the Vulgate as fundebat ("he was pouring"). Both Greek and Latin versions specify the physical mechanism (pouring) that the Hebrew verb leaves more general, describing the action only as "destruction" directed toward the ground.