How to find your name in Hebrew — and which place in the Torah answers it

People keep coming to me with the same question: how is my name written in Hebrew? Someone has been Alex or Helen all their life, but a grandmother used to call them by another name too, and that name is written down somewhere — on a certificate, in a parents' ketubah, on the back of an old photo. They want to know what stands behind it.

Where to start

First decide which name you mean. There is the name you are called now, and there may be a Hebrew name given at birth or at a brit. They can differ, and both are yours. If there is no Hebrew name, we use the one you have: Alexander is אלכסנדר, Helen is הלנה. Hebrew writes most vowels without letters, so one name can have two or three spellings. We show which one we chose and why, so you can correct it.

How the number comes out

Every Hebrew letter has a number: alef is 1, bet is 2, up to tav, 400. Numerologists did not invent this — the letters served as numerals long before Arabic digits. David is דוד: dalet 4, vav 6, dalet 4. Together, 14. That is the whole calculation, and anyone can check it on their fingers.

A Torah word with the same number

This is where it gets worth doing. The Five Books hold over three hundred thousand words, and almost any number has a word with that sum. For 14 it is, for example, זהב — gold. To be honest: the match alone means nothing. We tested random texts, and they produce even more matches. The point is not the coincidence. The point is that you now have a reason to open one particular verse and read it as yours.

What to do with it

Read the verse. Not to find a prediction in it — there is none — but to see what that place is about. Then add up your mother's name, your father's, your child's. The most interesting thing usually happens when two names from one family sit side by side: each has its own place in the Torah, and the distance between them can be read too.

Every step on the site is open: letters, numbers, verse address. If something is counted wrong, write to us and we will fix it. The method rests on my father's book, Binyamin Pichkhadze, “Chumash 354” (Bnei Brak, 2002).