The occasionally expressed popular belief that Shakespeare must have helped prepare the translation of the Bible completed for King James in 1610 is based solely on the circumstances that a few famous passages from the translation and from Shakespeare's tragedies are the only specimens of Jacobian English most people ever hear. Rudyard Kipling, however, composed a whimsical short story, Proofs of Holy Writ, in which one of the translators consults Shakespeare and Jonson, and in 1970, Anthony Burgess pointed out that in the King James Bible the 46th word of the 46th psalm, translated in Shakespeare's 46th year, is "shake", while the 46th word from the end (if one cheats by leaving out the last cadential word "selah", is "spear".

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The occasionally expressed popular belief that Shakespeare must have helped prepare the translation of the Bible completed for King James in 1610 is based solely on the circumstances that a few famous passages from the translation and from Shakespeare's tragedies are the only specimens of Jacobian English most people ever hear. Rudyard Kipling, however, composed a whimsical short story, Proofs of Holy Writ, in which one of the translators consults Shakespeare and Jonson, and in 1970, Anthony Burgess pointed out that in the King James Bible the 46th word of the 46th psalm, translated in Shakespeare's 46th year, is "shake", while the 46th word from the end (if one cheats by leaving out the last cadential word "selah", is "spear"." in the context of "Michael Dobson, in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001) edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley W. Wells; further observations regarding these associations are discussed in:
 • "Did William Shakespeare hide a message in the King James translation of the Bible?" by Gabriel Roth
 • "Shakespeare and the 46th Psalm" by David Pleacher
 • "Did Shakespeare Slip His Name in Psalm 46?" by Kyle Butt
 • "Ridiculous KJV Bible Corrections: Psalm 46, Shakespeare in the KJV?" by John Hinton" to mean that wisdom is timeless.