"Moses, you Bast**d" ...

I never have been able to get comfortable with the C-word. I can’t even summon the courage to type it. Yet I’m convinced that it is an appropriate – the appropriate – translation of Judges 5:30. After all these years the Bible still makes me uncomfortable and pushes me to the limit of my sensibilities. This is as it should be. In order for literature to sustain an audience over several millennia it must be more than chicken soup for the soul; it has to bend the reader just to the point of breakage and then no further.