Bishop Andrewes and his colleagues, a mixture of clergymen and classicists, were charged with revisiting the original Hebrew and Greek editions of the Old and New Testaments, along with the fragments of Aramaic that had found their way into the text. Understanding that their task was a patriotic and \u201cnation-building\u201d\u009d one (and impressed by the nascent idea of English Manifest Destiny, whereby the English people had replaced the Hebrews as God\u2019s chosen), whenever they could translate any ancient word for \u201cpeople\u201d\u009d or \u201ctribe\u201d\u009d as \u201cnation,\u201d\u009d they elected to do so. The term appears 454 times in this confident form of \u201cthe King\u2019s English.\u201d\u009d Meeting in Oxford and Cambridge college libraries for the most part, they often kept their notes in Latin. Their conservative and consensual project was politically short-lived: in a few years the land was to be convulsed with civil war, and the Puritan and parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell would sweep the head of King Charles I from his shoulders. But the translators\u2019 legacy remains, and it is paradoxically a revolutionary one, as well as a giant step in the maturing of English literature.<\/p>\n