SAPIR 861

How your name is written in the letters of the Torah

Your name in the Torah: in Hebrew letters, as a number, with the verse it lands on and the sources. Computed, not divined. Free.

Your name

רחל

Tap the letters of your name and add up its number yourself

The number of your name

רחל (רחל) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 30 times. First in Genesis 29:6.

Your word in the Torah

The word רחל — “Rachel, wife of Jacob” — has the same number as your name. Here is the verse where it first appears:

ויאמר להם השלום לו ויאמרו שלום והנה רחל בתו באה עם הצאן

Genesis 29:6

The verse of your name

There is a sentence with which, by custom, a person answers when asked who they are.

Yours is this one.

רבוע היה כפול עשו את החשן זרת ארכו וזרת רחבו כפול

Exodus 39:9

The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ר, and ends with the last, ל.

The custom is written down in the Kitzur Shelah and in Sefer Ben Zion: “say it regularly and never forget it as long as you live.” The Rokeach gives the reason in Chochmat ha-Nefesh: a person is asked their name, and whoever does not remember cannot answer. The verse holds the name for them. Siddur ha-Rashban puts it more plainly: children were made to learn their verse by heart — so that if they were taken and forgot everything else, they would still know who they were.

The week you were born

Add your date of birth and we will show which portion the world was reading the week you appeared, and whether it holds a word of your number.

How rare this number is

Torah portions with a word of number 238: 15 of 54

You are not alone in this number

The same number belongs to these names:

Algerd Arabella Bonifats Brigitte Elor Isidore Joiarib Vencheslav Ventseslav

How to read your number

Fact. The letters of the name רחל add up to 238. Plain addition — you can check it yourself.

Meaning. There is a Torah word with the same number — רחל (“Rachel, wife of Jacob”). A matching sum does not mean the word is 'about you'; it is a reason to look at what in it matters to you.

Story. Rachel knew Leah would be led to the wedding in her place, and gave her sister their secret signs so she would not be shamed. (Megillah 13b)

A question for yourself. What in this do you recognise in yourself — and what would you like to strengthen?

Practice. This week: open the verse of your name, read it slowly three times and write down one thought that stays with you.

What next

This card is free.

Full name reading, PDF · ₪59

The Family Book · ₪199

Hand-made reading — done personally · ₪390

Card, Bit, Apple Pay, Google Pay · PDF right after payment

The nine numbers of your name

238standard238with finals13reduced40ordinal936cumulative40964squares646building83atbash1002filling

The tradition counts a name in nine ways, each giving its own number. 6 of the nine have a word of their own in the Torah. We showed one. The rest are in the full report.

A verse for what you need

Pick a theme — we show a Tanakh verse on it that contains a word with your name's number (238).

Our verse — for two

Type the name of someone close. We find the verse that begins with a letter of one name and ends with a letter of the other — your pair's verse.

My days of the year

The days when the number of the Hebrew date equals your name's number, and the Shabbat when the world reads the portion of your verse — straight into your phone's calendar.

Add my days to the calendar

7 days with your verse

Every morning in Telegram — your verse, how to read it in Latin letters, and one new word. Half a minute a day. After seven days the verse stays with you.

Start in Telegram

Full report — free for the first hundred Send the verse of my name to Telegramfree, one tap

רחל

Spelling attested: this is how the name is recorded in the open Wikidata name base.

In short

Your name in Hebrew letters is רחל. “Ewe.” Jacob’s beloved wife, mother of Joseph and Benjamin; Jacob worked fourteen years for her (Genesis 29). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 238 — the same as the Torah word רחל, “Rachel, wife of Jacob”. That number points to Torah page 238 of 354 — in the portion Behaalotcha. What that portion is about: Lighting the lampstand; the second Passover; the cloud leads the camp; quail and complaints; Miriam and tzaraat. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 39:9. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.

Adding up the letters of the name רחל gives 238.

238

The number 238 is the Torah word רחל — «Rachel, wife of Jacob» (Genesis 29:6).

✓ Verify

This number is shared with 6 other name(s) out of the 2,980 in the index.

The number 238, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 238 in the book of Bamidbar (Numbers).

The verse this place falls on is Bamidbar (Numbers) 9:6:

וַיְהִי אֲנָשִׁים אֲשֶׁר הָיוּ טְמֵאִים לְנֶפֶשׁ אָדָם וְלֹא־יָכְלוּ לַעֲשֹׂת־הַפֶּסַח בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא וַיִּקְרְבוּ לִפְנֵי מֹשֶׁה וְלִפְנֵי אַהֲרֹן בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא

But there were certain men, who were unclean by the dead body of a man, so that they could not keep the passover on that day; and they came before Moses and before Aaron on that day.

This is from the portion Behaalotcha. What it is about: Lighting the lampstand; the second Passover; the cloud leads the camp; quail and complaints; Miriam and tzaraat.

Other ways of counting

The tradition counts the same name in several ways. The main one is above: each letter is its number. The other eight are old and checkable too; each gives its own number, and many of them have a Torah word with the same number.

Final letters as 500–900 (mispar gadol) — 238. A Torah word with the same number is רחל — “Rachel, wife of Jacob” (Genesis 29:6).

Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 13. A Torah word with the same number is אחד — “one” (Genesis 1:5).

Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 40. A Torah word with the same number is חלב — “fat” (Genesis 4:4).

Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 936.

Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 40964.

Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 646. A Torah word with the same number is דברתם — “you have spoken” (Exodus 12:32).

The letters that come out are גסכ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 83. A Torah word with the same number is חלילה — “far be it” (Genesis 18:25).

Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1002.

The number 238 appears in the classical books 20 times across 9 works. The earliest mention is בעל הטורים על התורה (~1300).

The name רחל appears in the Torah as a word 30 times. The first time is Genesis 29:6. Another 14 times it stands with prefixes — “and”, “in”, “the”.

The verse of your name

There is a custom: at the end of the prayer one says a Torah verse that begins with the first letter of one's name and ends with its last. For רחל these are ר and ל. The Pentateuch has 3 such verses. The first of them is Exodus 39:9:

רבוע היה כפול עשו את החשן זרת ארכו וזרת רחבו כפול

This is from the portion Pekudei. What it is about: The accounting of the materials; the priestly garments are finished; the Tabernacle is raised on the first of Nisan; the cloud covers it.

Name report — free for the first hundred Name and date

The full message

Every letter of the name explained, the words and namesakes with references, the Hebrew date, the letter and tribe of the month, day 861 of your life (±1), the psalm by age, the attestations from the classical books — a PDF sent to your email.

The number of the day, every morning

Every date has a number too. Once a year it will match the number of your name — 238. The channel posts one number a day, one verse and the Torah page it lands on. Nothing after it, no mailing list.

Open the channel

Your name's day

Any name written in Hebrew letters is a number: רחל = 238. And every date has a number of its own. There is a day in the year when the two coincide.

2027-05-2417 Iyyar 5787in 212 days

The verse of that day

«But there were certain men, who were unclean by the dead body of a man, so that they could not keep the passover on that day; and they came before Moses and before Aaron on that day.»

Bamidbar (Numbers) 9:6 · 238 / 354

Half of all names have such a day.

Card “my name's day”2027-05-24 →

How it is counted

Each Hebrew letter has a number; a word's number is their sum (alef 1 … tav 400). The page is the remainder modulo 354: the Torah divided into 354 pages of 861 letters, as the lunar year has 354 days. Everything can be checked by hand.

Binyamin Pichkhadze, «Chumash 354» (חומש 354), Bnei Brak, 2002 · Addition, not prophecy.

Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (WLC), CC BY 4.0

Your name is already a message

How your name is written in the letters of the Torah