The Woman's Bible women's rights. Gage determined that the Church had acted against women's interests in important ways: from Roman Catholic canon law, to Scripture, to its advocacy of celibacy and more. Especially troubling to Gage was the story of Adam and Eve. On August 1, 1895, the first part of "The Woman's Bible" was published, covering the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The text went through seven printings in six months; it was a best-seller. In January 1898, the second part was published, covering the rest of the Old Testament as well as
The Book of Genesis (comics) on the work, as would have been expected. Reviewers have called the style "humanizing", with a "human-looking deity" with "enormous, hairy, veiny hands"; unlike much later Christian art, which Europeanized the characters from the Old and New Testaments, the characters in Crumb's book are "plac[ed...] squarely in the Middle East — and populat[ed...] with distinctly Semitic-looking people". The clothing and sets in the book were based on stills from classic Hollywood movies, as "there's not a lot of documentation about how people dressed and lived in ancient Mesopotamia." Crumb originally intended to do a sendup of the Book of Genesis,