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.
The number of your name is 264. The Torah word ירדן — “Jarden, the principal river of Palestine” — has the same.
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.
בשנת שש מאות שנה לחיי נח בחדש השני בשבעה עשר יום לחדש ביום הזה נבקעו כל מעינת תהום רבה וארבת השמים נפתחו
Genesis 7:11
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ב, and ends with the last, ו.
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 264 appears in 28 of the 54 weekly portions.
You are not alone in this number
The same number belongs to these names:
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.
Bruno — The customary Hebrew spelling of this name. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
ברונו
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is ברונו. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 264 — the same as the Torah word ירדן, “Jarden, the principal river of Palestine”. That number points to Torah page 264 of 354 — in the portion Balak. What that portion is about: Balak hires Balaam; the donkey sees the angel; blessing instead of curse: “how goodly are your tents, O Jacob”. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 7:11. 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 ברונו gives 264.
264
The number 264 is the Torah word ירדן — «Jarden, the principal river of Palestine» (Genesis 13:10).
The number 264, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 264 in the book of Bamidbar (Numbers). These are its opening words:
רכב על אתנו ושני נעריו עמו ותרא האתון …
The verse this place falls on is Bamidbar (Numbers) 22:22:
וַיִּחַר־אַף אֱלֹהִים כִּי־הוֹלֵךְ הוּא וַיִּתְיַצֵּב מַלְאַךְ ה׳ בַּדֶּרֶךְ לְשָׂטָן לוֹ וְהוּא רֹכֵב עַל־אֲתֹנוֹ וּשְׁנֵי נְעָרָיו עִמּוֹ
And G-d's anger was kindled because he went; and the angel of HaShem placed himself in the way for an adversary against him. --Now he was riding upon his ass, and his two servants were with him.--
This is from the portion Balak. What it is about: Balak hires Balaam; the donkey sees the angel; blessing instead of curse: “how goodly are your tents, O Jacob”.
The same number, 264, is given by these biblical names:
ירדן · נחור · חורן · גמריהו
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) — 264. A Torah word with the same number is ירדן — “Jarden, the principal river of Palestine” (Genesis 13:10).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 21. A Torah word with the same number is אך — “a particle of affirmation, surely” (Genesis 7:23).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 48. A Torah word with the same number is יובל — “the blast of a horn” (Exodus 19:13).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1035.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 42576.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 934.
The word that comes out is שגפטפ. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 472. A Torah word with the same number is עבת — “something intwined, i.e. a string, wreath or…” (Exodus 28:14).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1052.
The number 264 appears in the classical books 6 times across 3 works. The earliest mention is מגלה עמוקות (~1637).
The name ברונו does not stand as a word in the Pentateuch — as with most names, including many Tanakh names from the later books.
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 ברונו these are ב and ו. The Pentateuch has 19 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 7:11:
בשנת שש מאות שנה לחיי נח בחדש השני בשבעה עשר יום לחדש ביום הזה נבקעו כל מעינת תהום רבה וארבת השמים נפתחו
This is from the portion Noach. What it is about: The flood and the ark; the rainbow as a sign of the covenant; the tower of Babel; ten generations from Noah to Abraham.
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.