The Psalm 46 Curiosity

A frequently repeated curiosity concerns the forty-sixth Psalm in the King James Version: the forty-sixth word from the beginning is shake and the forty-sixth word from the end, discounting the closing Selah, is spear, and since the translation was completed when William Shakespeare was in his forties, some have supposed a hidden signature. The pattern is real but almost certainly a coincidence, since the relevant words stand where the older Geneva Bible already put them, before any plausible tampering, and the counting has to be arranged just so. It is a good example of the kind of numerical Easter egg that turns up whenever a text is long enough to be searched, and it tells us nothing about the number forty-six beyond the human appetite for finding patterns.

The shake-and-spear curiosity in the King James Psalm 46 is sometimes presented as a numerological finding, but it depends on counting words in a specific English translation rather than on any value assigned to letters or names, so it belongs to a different category of number-play than Cheiro's compound-number scheme or the Balliett chart described throughout this family of articles, a coincidence of translation and word-count rather than a claim any numerological tradition, ancient or modern, would recognise as its own method.