Sixty-Six Books: 21st-century writers speak to the King James Bible

A Contemporary Response to the King James Bible

the bush theatre

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849432276
• eBook ISBN: 9781849432986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

The King James Version of the Bible (KJV) is a foundation stone of the English language. The KJV was composed as a collective project and written to be spoken. Sixty-Six Books has been created, in the spirit of the original, in the same way. Pulpit to print; stage to page; mediated through many forms oral and written this is a work that has travelled to every continent of the globe. It has been shared as a melodic instrument of inspiration, illumination and mutual understanding; and it has also been wielded as a tool of colonial oppression. Sixty-Six Books is a fresh interpretation of the KJV for the new millennium, celebrating and challenging the traditions and achievements of this great work on the occasion of its 400th anniversary. The curators of this project have gathered together a formidable and inspiring line-up of the best established and emerging writing talent to respond to create a new a book of the KJV, speaking back to the KJV with untrammelled inventiveness of the imagination. The voices of Sixty-Six Books, drawn from across five continents, innovate, transmute, transpose, reinvent and talk back to four hundred years of history.
Authors include: Kwame Kwei-Armah, NeilBartlett, Billy Bragg, Laura Dockrill, Carol Ann Duffy, Stella Duffy, David Eldridge, Naomi Foyle, Nancy Harris, Jackie Kay, Neil LaBute, Nick Laird, Stewart Lee, Kate Mosse, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, Anya Reiss, Tim Rice, Michael Rosen, Wole Soyinka, Enda Walsh, Rowan Williams, Jeanette Winterson and many more.

1 SAMUEL

Andrew Motion

DAVID AND GOLIATH

No one not even the king knew where I came from.

Everyone knew what lay ahead in the deep valley

between two mountains. Six cubits and a span high.

Brass helmet. Coat of mail and the weight of the coat

was five thousand shekels of brass. Greaves of brass

on his legs and a target of brass between his shoulders.

The grip of his spear was thick as a weaver’s beam.

Its head alone weighed six hundred shekels of iron.

and one bearing a shield went before him. Choose

you a man for you and let him come down to me.

That was his message. My message was a question:

Is there not a cause? I took up my staff in one hand,

my sling in the other, and picked five smooth stones

from the brook. I looked at the stones and they looked

back at me. The stones knew all there was of history.

2 SAMUEL

Wole Soyinka

THUS SPAKE ORUNMILA...

In the name of Olodumare, Deity Supreme, who sits not in judgement, but presides in ambidextrous equity, right and left, over the affairs of humanity, and to whom notions such as infidel, unbeliever or pagan are for ever anathema. A-a-ase.

Opening bars of ‘How are the Mighty Fallen’. Fade out as Reading begins.

How are the mighty fallen!

Are there stars still glistening in the firmament of kings?

There is no tragedy in the overthrow of kings, be they consigned to dungeons, banished, garroted or guillotined, thrown over their royal parapets or impaled on their own palace spikes; the real tragedy of our time is lodged in the walking, strutting two-legged things that would be kings, tongues of cant that promise liberation but fashion new forms of enslavement, harbingers of an era of enlightenment, in truth tawdry, inglorious mimics even of the flawed majesties of nation builders and sometimes – wreckers.

Kingship has ever carried its own seeds of destruction, albeit slow in germination. Even language has taken its toll. ‘Scandal’ has displaced ‘royal dalliance’. Scions of ancient dynasties affect ‘the common touch’ but only as the lowest social mores. Bribery stains the family escutcheon, pollutes the founts of moral peerage, scorns service as pedigree. These are not even intermediaries of business interests seeking the ears of governments, but ermine dragged in seamy deals through royal corridors, bordellos, and racetracks. Where reduced in stature by the jackboots of the military, they grovel for contract leftovers, scramble to serve ‘the government of the day’.

Are these the monarchs whom the griots rhapsodised? Shaka of the amaZulu? Asantehene of the Golden Stool? Richard Plantagenet and his chivalrous rival Emperor Saladin? No, nothing but cruelties of today’s tinsel crowns endure. Their ears are no longer tuned to the lyrical strings of Sundiata’s balafon, the love offerings of Suleiman or the limpid cadences of King David’s harp and psalms. Their portion is the raucous immediacy of Jimmy Cliff’s electric guitar and lyrics, fervid, turbid, and subversive.

Up: Jimmy Cliff’s ‘The Harder They Come’.

The harder they come

The harder they fall, one and all,

Fade out.

The crash of the mighty generates not a whiff of purifying lament. No bard wraps them in lyric shrouds, not even as one king in tribute to another. When they die, the people turn their heads away, spit or dance on their graves. For the poets – and all that is of redeeming grace – have been wasted, tortured, buried alive in prison cells or hounded into exile. The survivors are objects of public scorn for there is only one route their trade permits – turn court jesters, or forever hold their tongues.

We shall not glamorize the past. Let it therefore be acknowledged that, in the arena of cruelty and violence, the honours remain even, ancient and modern are evenly matched. Some, like the Magnificent Suleiman, much given to reflection, acknowledged their own entrapment...

What men call sovereignty is worldly strife and constant war.

These ancient Kings, now cloaked in the soothing patina of antiquity and elevated to epic magnitude, rode into history on steeds of violence, often steeped in superstition, prey to dreams and auguries but then, were they not just as fearful and cruel as the people over whom they reigned?

Put two thousand prisoners to the sword did King Richard Plantagenet, to the applause of his Christian followers! ‘Give us seven men from the House of Saul that we may hang them,’ thus bring an end to the cycle of blood-debt that had brought famine on the land. King David obliged, and hanged indeed were the offering. And it is told that the Lord of Hosts approved the act, for Nature was appeased, and the wind of famine dropped. How quaint they would have found the symbolic Rites of Restitution even of pre-literate times, or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the reign of that great Avatar of Peace, Nelson Mandela and his prophet, a man of great visionary valour, Desmond Tutu.

In truth now, how much has changed? In two thousand years and more, how far up the ladder of evolution has humanity clambered? Is the bloodlust withered in the veins of the species? Figures of myth only reflect human tendencies, sometimes histories, else visionary aspirations, often all inextricably tangled. Was Gilgamesh history or myth? He built cities, enacted laws, was not spared his share of brutalities. Or King Thor, at once god of fertility and destruction. His Yoruba sibling bears the name Sango, another handyman with the hammer of thunder, destroyer yet administrator of justice. All were kings and gods in the same body and essence. King David was Ogun in mortal visitation, Ogun, god of war, custodian of the sacred oath, Muse of the poets, breath at the blacksmith’s bellows, cultivator, pioneer of the sciences. And the mortal tendencies that bind both, and many more – a love of women, wine, and strife. Nation builders both but – inevitably – people destroyers. Nonetheless, theirs were realms where poetry wore the robes of grace, and catharsis...

Faintly in the background: ‘Dead March in Saul’.

How are the mighty fallen,

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon...

Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew,

Neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offering...

That was – once upon a time. The prophet’s voice today is of Jimmy Cliff and it is not the voice of catharsis, but of pending anomie and just deserts, the voice of the new prophets, not tuned to patience, deaf to the sermonizers of self-denial, dismissive of divine apportionment, aroused to the primordial cry of instant equity.

So as sure as the sun will shine

I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine

And then the harder they come,

The harder they fall, one and all

O-oh the harder they come

The harder they fall, one and all

The warnings of the new poets were not heeded. The crash of the mighty narrates the history of mankind, though it takes its toll in human loss. It comes in waves, echoing upheavals of Nature and evoking notions of prophetic empathy, for has the season of convulsions not been felt in frequency and magnitude of floods, earthquakes, firestorms and Tsunamis, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific?

How have the mighty fallen? With a thunderous crash, like the statue of Saddam, and with pitiable inelegance. Tsunamis do not grow in deserts but castles built on sands heave and collapse just as surely as sand dunes lift and shift shapes between night and dawn, bury encampments of the complacent desert lords. They that play the king? Unasked, unsought, uninvited, one and all, they force wind-filled heads into the royal diadem. It is decreed, he that plays at king ends as flies to wanton gods. Most shall prove merely fortunate to escape the fate of Saul – beheaded, dismembered and plastered to his palace walls, but not before that broken monarch had witnessed the deaths of his own sons, as has his modern progeny, pinned to the city walls of Tripoli.

Strains of ‘The Harder They Fall’ in the background.

The bell tolled first in Tunisia, the king was put to rout, still the warnings of Prophet Jimmy went unheeded. Tunisia’s commoner, at the bitter end of his tether, sets himself on fire, and the act consumes self-anointed kings across the Maghreb, its flames leap across seas and deserts into arena of ancient and yet unfinished conflicts where once King David, his tribes, armies and adversaries lived, strove, thrived, perished and regrouped. History continues its remorseless turn of the wheel but – without the poetry, no, the poetry has fled, and the language of power is at the mercy of jackdaws, crows, and vultures, augmenting the screech of torturers. And killers. Their lips are ever glued to the name of god. To him is greatness, his greatness extolled even as youth is hanged in the dank secrecy of the prisons of Iran for daring sanctimonious priest-kings, for humming refrains to the gospel of Jimmy Cliff.

Fallen indeed are the mighty civilizations of the race of Persia, of ancient Babylon, dried the fountains of the arts of literacy, collapsed the archways over the valleys of the Tigris, even as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon fore-echoed the gallows destiny of a tyrant, the counterfeiting Suleiman of his age, King Saddam Hussein.

What a stiff-necked breed these king players of modern times! Whatever gods King Qaddafi worshipped, he of the many splendored Bedouin tent with a harem to shield his body, those gods had taken leave of him, as he of his senses, beyond recovery even from the ministrations of King David’s harp, or the healing balafon of Sundiata. Once, so long ago, Muammar of the king’s palace guard overthrew a dynasty of parasites, but only that the janissary could himself set up a dynasty of one, to whom all bow in fear and homage. But the circle of karma closes on the dissolute rich as on the richly deserving. The arc of restitution distends, then draws ever tighter on thrones of the alienated.

Egypt followed swiftly upon Tunisia, and tremors were felt in Morocco, an earthquake of uncharted dimensions. The kings of Saudi heard, took heed, sent out town criers to spread news of great reform: the price of bread was lowered and other palliatives in tow to douse the flickering flames from Tunisia. But the chant of the populace continues – Too late, and too little. And Yemen followed suit, where the king’s men dispensed pellets of lead for pallets of bread, the Leaven of Life without which even Freedom is an empty word.

Syria, ancient Arma, buckled at first, then the heart of King al-Assad grew rigid as the Obelisk of Axum. His ears turned away from the warnings of the singing prophet of Jah, he came down ever harder on his people. Syria, a calloused finger of the secret fist of power named Ba’ath, drenched her streets with the blood of commoners. King Muammar, reviled in the Occident as the Madman of Libya took heart and followed suit, donned the iron gauntlet. True, it was indeed madness as of Saul that plagued King Qaddafi but there was also a perpetual high, No one truly knew the substance of his addiction but it answers the same name – alienation. Helicopter gunships spewing fire on human waves, King Muammar no longer sees the teeming servants of Allah – to Muammar, all are vermin, and the nation overdue for cleansing.

Shall we hear the lamentation of a David chanted over their biers? No, their destiny was prefigured in the end of Master-Sergeant King Doe of Liberia, his mouth forced open to serve as a urinal for one of the multitude of children he had orphaned, often in a manner worthy of the ancients. And his ears that were fashioned after the saying ‘Ears have they but they hear not’ were sliced off by his captors, for he clearly had no use for them. Thus messily do the mighty fall in a once mighty continent!

Yet again and again, others before them have impaled themselves on the signpost of precedence, visible to all but the blind, deaf and incorrigible. Among the parade of forerunners, let us recall Macías ‘Ki’NGuema’ of Malabo who had long preceded Saddam to the hangman’s noose. To do him final honours, hangmen journeyed forth from distant Morocco, for Macías was a man much famed for his dark powers, more potent than the Witch of Endor, powers that many feared could reach beyond the grave and drag his judges down to his abode in hell.

And in the land of Zimbabwe, how are the mighty fallen? Like ruins of the ancient fort of Zimbabwe, landmark of a vanished civilization that multitudes flock to see from the ends of the earth. For Mugabe was a man much beloved of a continent in thrall, a hero of deliverance from marauding tribes, bleached skin and flaxen hair, who crossed the ocean, seeking land, plunder, and slaves. How shall such wreckage of reve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• The Bush Theatre
• Contents
• Foreword
• Genesis: Godblog
• Exodus: The Crossing
• Leviticus: The Foundation
• Numbers The Opening of the Mouth
• Deuteronomy: The Rules
• Joshua: Sole Fide – By Faith Alone
• Judges: Beardy
• Ruth: The Book of Ruth (and Naomi)
• 1 Samuel: David and Goliath
• 2 Samuel: Thus Spake Orunmila…
• 1 Kings: The Suleman
• 2 Kings: Two Bears
• 1 Chronicles: The Chronicle
• 2 Chronicles: From Solomon to Cyrus the Great
• Ezra: The Strange Wife
• Nehemiah: When he had been loved…
• Esther: Hadassah
• Job: In the Land of Uz
• Psalms: When We Praise
• Proverbs: Notes for a Young Gentleman
• Ecclesiastes: The Preacher, or How Ecclesiastes Changed My Life
• Song of Solomon: The Beauty of the Church
• Isaiah: All the trees of the field
• Jeremiah: A Lost Expression
• Lamentations: Halter-Neck
• Ezekiel: The Fair & Tender
• Daniel: Oliver Lewis
• Hosea: Fugitive Motel
• Joel: I Notice the Sound First
• Amos: Amos the Shepherd Curses the Rulers of Ancient Israel
• Obadiah: The House Next Door
• Jonah: Cetacean
• Micah: Flare
• Nahum: God is Jealous
• Habakkuk: Habaccuc Dreams
• Zephaniah: In the night, a promise
• Haggai it is having fallen out of grace
• Zechariah: The End of the Alphabet
• Malachi: When You Left I Thought I’d Die But Now I’m Fine
• The Gospel According to St Matthew: A Nobody
• The Gospel According to St Mark: Capernaum
• The Gospel According to St Luke: Do Unto Others
• The Gospel According to St John: Lazarus
• The Acts of the Apostles: Acts
• Romans: The Man Who Came to Brunch
• 1 Corinthians: Without Love
• 2 Corinthians: The Wood Orchid
• Galatians: The Transgressor
• Ephesians: Ephesus-Shmephesus
• Philippians: The Loss of All Things
• Colossians: Uncool Religion
• 1 Thessalonians: Paul’s First Voicemail to Thessa
• 2 Thessalonians: Falling Away
• 1 Timothy: Concerning Faith
• 2 Timothy: Hand-Me-Downs
• Titus: A Sunday Sermon
• Philemon: The Letter
• Hebrews: The Middle Man
• James: Salvation and Justification Reprised Anew
• 1 Peter: Snow in Sheffield
• 2 Peter: False Teachers
• 1 John: Something, Someone, Somewhere
• 2 John: Men in Verse
• 3 John: Room 303
• Jude: The Goat at Midnight
• Revelation: Endpapers
• Appendix
• About the Bush Theatre