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 Exodus were Canaanite rulers of the Egyptian Delta in the 16th century BCE, may have formed the basis of the descent into Egypt and the exodus. The meaning a reader takes away from a text depends on his or her understanding of the literary "type" to which it belongs: as one scholar puts it in his discussion of the Genesis creation myth, "it makes an enormous difference whether the first chapters of Genesis are read as scientific cosmology, creation myth, or historical saga" (Wood, 1990). There is an almost universal consensus among scholars that the Exodus story is best understood as