Martin Madan and Thelyphthora: The Man Who Argued for Polygyny from Scripture — and Was Destroyed for It

He saw women being destroyed by men who made promises with no intention of keeping them. He went to Scripture for an answer. What he found cost him everything.

In 1780, one of the most respected evangelical clergymen in England published a three-volume work arguing from the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament that polygyny was lawful, that a man who had relations with a woman was married to her in God's sight whether he acknowledged it or not, and that the epidemic of seduction and abandonment devastating the women of England was not a moral failure that could be solved by better preaching — it was a legal and covenantal failure that required a return to the biblical definition of marriage.

The work was called Thelyphthora — a Greek word meaning "the destruction of women."

The man who wrote it was Martin Madan. And within a few years of its publication, his career was over, his reputation was in ruins, and he had retired in disgrace to spend the rest of his life in relative obscurity.

The argument he made has never been answered. It has only been suppressed.

The Man Before the Storm

Martin Madan was born in 1726 into a well-connected English family. His cousin was William Cowper, one of the greatest English poets of the 18th century. Madan was trained as a lawyer and showed every sign of following a conventional professional career — until, by his own account, he attended a John Wesley sermon intending to mock it, and left converted.

His conversion was genuine and deep. He was ordained as an Anglican clergyman and became one of the more prominent figures in the evangelical revival that was reshaping English Christianity in the mid-18th century. He was a gifted preacher, a musician, and a hymn writer — he compiled a collection of hymns that influenced the development of evangelical hymnody in England.

In 1750 he became chaplain of the Lock Hospital in London — an institution founded to care for women suffering from venereal disease, which in practice meant women who had been seduced, abandoned, and left destitute, many of them driven into prostitution by circumstances that began with a broken promise from a man who had no intention of keeping it. Madan served there for nearly thirty years.

What he saw in those thirty years is what produced Thelyphthora.

The Pastoral Problem

The women who came through the doors of the Lock Hospital told variations of the same story. A man had courted them. He had made promises — often explicit promises of marriage. He had relations with them on the basis of those promises. And then he had disappeared — sometimes to marry a wealthier woman, sometimes simply because he could, because the social and legal structures of 18th century England imposed no meaningful consequence on a man who seduced and abandoned a woman of lower social standing.

The woman was left with her reputation destroyed, often with a child, often without employment or family support, frequently with disease, and with no legal recourse. The man suffered nothing.

Madan watched this pattern for nearly three decades. He counseled these women. He buried some of them. He saw what happened to their children. And he became increasingly convinced that the church's response — moral exhortation directed primarily at the women, vague denunciations of male licentiousness that produced no structural change — was inadequate to the scale of the problem.

He went to Scripture. And what he found there was not what he expected, and not what his contemporaries wanted to hear.

Thelyphthora: The Argument

Thelyphthora was published in 1780 in three substantial volumes. It was a work of serious biblical scholarship — whatever one concludes about its conclusions. Madan worked through the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek of the New Testament, and the full range of relevant passages with the tools of an educated 18th century clergyman who took the text seriously.

His central argument had two interlocking parts.

First: The biblical definition of marriage is not a ceremony. It is a covenant established by the physical union of a man and a woman. When Exodus 22:16–17 says that if a man seduces a virgin he must marry her, the Hebrew text assumes that the act itself has constituted a marriage in God's sight. The seducer does not have the option of paying money and walking away from a woman he is not “obligated” to marry — the text says he has already married her. The payment is a bride price, not an exit fee. Madan argued that the church had so thoroughly ceremonialized marriage that it had lost the covenantal reality the text actually describes — and that this loss was directly responsible for the epidemic of seduction and abandonment he witnessed at the Lock Hospital.

Second: Because Scripture never prohibits a man from having more than one wife — and because the Torah explicitly legislates for polygynous households in passages like Exodus 21:10 and Deuteronomy 21:15–17 — a man who had relations with multiple women was not committing adultery. He was married to all of them, whether he acknowledged it or not, and was therefore obligated to support and provide for all of them. The legal and social chaos of 18th century England — men abandoning women, children growing up fatherless, women driven into prostitution — was the direct consequence of refusing to hold men to the covenantal obligations that Scripture actually imposed.

Thelyphthora was not an argument for libertinism. It was an argument for male accountability. Madan was not saying men should be free to have multiple women. He was saying men who had relations with women were bound to them — permanently, covenantally, with full legal and financial obligation — and that society's refusal to enforce this was destroying women by the thousands.

The title said it plainly: the destruction of women. That was what he was trying to stop.

The Firestorm

The response was immediate and overwhelming.

Pamphlets appeared within weeks. Sermons were preached against Thelyphthora from pulpits across England. Theological treatises were written to refute it. The evangelical community — which had celebrated Madan for thirty years — turned on him with a ferocity that suggested something beyond mere theological disagreement had been activated.

His cousin William Cowper, the poet, wrote a lengthy satirical poem called Anti-Thelyphthora mocking the work and its author. The personal nature of that attack — from a family member, in public, in verse designed to be widely circulated — gives some measure of the social pressure Madan was under.

The board of the Lock Hospital, the very institution whose patients had generated the pastoral crisis that produced the book, forced his resignation. The man who had served those women for nearly thirty years, who had written a book specifically arguing that men should be held legally and covenantally accountable for what they did to women, was removed from his position caring for women — by an institution that apparently found the argument he made on their behalf more scandalous than the behavior that had destroyed them in the first place.

Madan retired. He did not publicly recant. He spent the remaining decade of his life in relative quiet and died in 1790.

What Was Actually Refuted — and What Was Not

The responses to Thelyphthora were numerous. They were not uniformly strong.

Most of the refutations operated on one of three grounds. Some argued from tradition — that the church had always defined marriage as monogamous, and that this consensus carried authority. Madan would have replied, and did, that consensus is not exegesis, and that the question was what Scripture said, not what the church had subsequently decided. Some argued from the New Testament, particularly from passages about elders being the husband of one wife (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6) — to which Madan replied that a qualification for eldership is not a universal prohibition, and that the passage assumes the existence of men with more than one wife rather than condemning them. Some argued from Matthew 19 and Yeshua's teaching on divorce — but Yeshua's words there address divorce and remarriage, not polygyny, and the argument requires reading into the text a prohibition that is not stated.

What none of the responses did was engage seriously with the Exodus 22 argument — the claim that physical union itself constitutes marriage in God's sight and that a man is therefore covenantally bound to every woman with whom he has relations. This was the pastoral heart of Thelyphthora, and it was largely ignored in favor of attacking the polygyny argument, which was easier to make socially scandalous and therefore easier to dismiss without answering.

The question Madan raised — what does God consider a marriage to be, and what obligations does that impose on men — was not answered. It was drowned out.

The Irony That History Recorded

Martin Madan watched women being destroyed. He spent thirty years in pastoral proximity to that destruction. He wrote a book arguing that Scripture held men to a higher standard of covenantal accountability than English law or English church practice required — and that restoring that standard was the only adequate response to the crisis he witnessed.

He was destroyed for it.

The men who seduced and abandoned the women of Lock Hospital suffered no such consequence. They are not remembered at all. Madan is remembered — when he is remembered — as the eccentric clergyman who wrote the scandalous book about polygamy.

The irony is almost too neat to be accidental. A man argues that men should be held permanently accountable to the women they have relations with, and the response of his community is to permanently destroy his reputation and career while the men whose behavior generated the crisis continue undisturbed.

Thelyphthora was about the destruction of women. What happened to Madan was a demonstration of how the same social forces that destroyed women could destroy any man who took their destruction seriously enough to name its cause.

The Theological Question That Remains

Thelyphthora was published in 1780. It has been out of print for most of the intervening two and a half centuries. It is not assigned in seminaries. It is not discussed in theology courses. When it is mentioned at all, it is usually as a curiosity — an example of how far a well-meaning man can go wrong.

But the questions it raises have not gone away.

What does Scripture define marriage to be? Is it a ceremony, or a covenant? If it is a covenant, when is that covenant established — at the signing of a legal document, or at the moment of union the text actually describes? If a man has obligations to every woman he has relations with, what are those obligations, and who enforces them?

These are not questions that were answered by the pamphlets of 1780. They are questions that were suppressed by social pressure and institutional force — which is a different thing entirely.

The Hebrew Scriptures that Madan read have not changed. The pastoral crisis he identified has not diminished — it has accelerated beyond anything he could have imagined, in a world where the obligations of men to the women they have relations with have been reduced to essentially nothing by law, by culture, and by a church that long ago stopped asking what Scripture actually says about the matter.

Martin Madan asked. He paid for asking.

The question is still on the table.