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
You did not choose your name. It was given — almost always after someone who came before you.
Alon (אלון) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 2 times. First in Genesis 12:6.
Alon (אלון) — “Oak.” The tree under which Rebecca’s nurse was buried (Genesis 35:8).
And the same number belongs to the Torah word נבלה — “a flabby thing, i.e. a carcase or carrion”.
87 and 87.
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.
אלה בני אצר בלהן וזעון ועקן
Genesis 36:27
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, א, and ends with the last, נ.
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
A word with the number 87 appears in 30 of the 54 weekly portions.
What is left
We counted your name in one system. There are nine, and they give nine different numbers. When several systems lead to the same portion, the tradition reads that theme as strong. So far you have one.
Below — how this was counted, letter by letter.
Alon — A name of biblical origin — its biblical spelling is used. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
אלון
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אלון. “Oak.” The tree under which Rebecca’s nurse was buried (Genesis 35:8). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 87 — the same as the Torah word נבלה, “a flabby thing, i.e. a carcase or carrion”. That number points to Torah page 87 of 354 — in the portion Vayechi. What that portion is about: Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh and all his sons; Jacob's death and burial in Hebron; Joseph's death. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 36:27. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. There are no predictions or judgments here — only the text of the Torah and arithmetic you can check.
Adding up the letters of the name אלון gives 87.
87
The number 87 is the Torah word נבלה — «a flabby thing, i.e. a carcase or carrion» (Leviticus 5:2).
The number 87, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 87 in the book of Bereshit (Genesis). These are its opening words:
והרביתך ונתתיך לקהל עמים ונתתי את הארץ הזאת …
The verse this place falls on is Bereshit (Genesis) 48:4:
וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלַי הִנְנִי מַפְרְךָ וְהִרְבִּיתִךָ וּנְתַתִּיךָ לִקְהַל עַמִּים וְנָתַתִּי אֶת־הָאָרֶץ הַזֹּאת לְזַרְעֲךָ אַחֲרֶיךָ אֲחֻזַּת עוֹלָם
and said unto me: Behold, I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and I will make of thee a company of peoples; and will give this land to thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession.
This is from the portion Vayechi. What it is about: Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh and all his sons; Jacob's death and burial in Hebron; Joseph's death.
The same number, 87, is given by these biblical names:
לבנה · עזי · אלון · בלאדן
Nine 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) — 737.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 15. A Torah word with the same number is זוב — “to flow freely” (Exodus 3:8).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 33. A Torah word with the same number is גל — “something rolled, i.e. a heap of stone or dung” (Genesis 31:46).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 322. A Torah word with the same number is כבש — “a ram” (Exodus 12:5).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 3437.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 156. A Torah word with the same number is יוסף — “Joseph, the name of seven Israelites” (Genesis 30:24).
The word that comes out is תכפט. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 509. A Torah word with the same number is שטר — “a scribe, i.e.” (Exodus 5:6).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 303. A Torah word with the same number is שאב — “to bale up water” (Genesis 24:11).
The number 87 appears in the classical books 24 times across 12 works. The earliest mention is ספר קרניים (~1400).
The name אלון appears in the Torah as a word 2 times. The first time is Genesis 12:6. Another 3 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 אלון these are א and נ. The Pentateuch has 35 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 36:27:
אלה בני אצר בלהן וזעון ועקן
This is from the portion Vayishlach. What it is about: Wrestling with the angel and the name Israel; the meeting with Esau; Dinah in Shechem; the birth of Benjamin and Rachel's death.
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.
Биньямин Пичхадзе, «Хумаш 354» (חומש 354), Бней-Брак, 2002 / התשס״ג · A calculation, not a prediction.