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.
Dan (דן) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 26 times. First in Genesis 14:14.
Dan (דן) — “He has judged” (Genesis 30:6). Jacob’s fifth son; the tribe of Dan marched at the rear of the camp.
And the same number belongs to the Torah word מטה — “a branch”.
54 and 54.
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.
דבר אל בני ישראל ואמרת אלהם כי תבאו אל הארץ אשר אני נתן לכם וקצרתם את קצירה והבאתם את עמר ראשית קצירכם אל הכהן
Leviticus 23:10
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ד, 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 54 appears in 35 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.
Dan — 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.
דן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is דן. “He has judged” (Genesis 30:6). Jacob’s fifth son; the tribe of Dan marched at the rear of the camp. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 54 — the same as the Torah word מטה, “a branch”. That number points to Torah page 54 of 354 — in the portion Vayetzei. What that portion is about: The dream of the ladder to heaven; Jacob with Laban: Leah and Rachel; eleven sons are born; the return. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Leviticus 23:10. 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 דן gives 54.
54
The number 54 is the Torah word מטה — «a branch» (Genesis 38:18).
Fifty-four weekly portions of the Torah.
The number 54, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 54 in the book of Bereshit (Genesis). These are its opening words:
ביום אכלני חרב וקרח בלילה ותדד שנתי מעיני …
The verse this place falls on is Bereshit (Genesis) 31:40:
הָיִיתִי בַיּוֹם אֲכָלַנִי חֹרֶב וְקֶרַח בַּלָּיְלָה וַתִּדַּד שְׁנָתִי מֵעֵינָי
Thus I was: in the day the drought consumed me, and the frost by night; and my sleep fled from mine eyes.
This is from the portion Vayetzei. What it is about: The dream of the ladder to heaven; Jacob with Laban: Leah and Rachel; eleven sons are born; the return.
The same number, 54, is given by these biblical names:
דן · מדי · זבדיאל · בנב
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) — 704. A Torah word with the same number is חצרות — “Chatseroth, a place in Palestine” (Numbers 11:35).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 9. A Torah word with the same number is בוא — “to go or come” (Genesis 2:19).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 18. A Torah word with the same number is חי — “alive” (Genesis 1:20).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 205. A Torah word with the same number is הר — “a mountain or range of hills” (Genesis 7:19).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 2516.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 58. A Torah word with the same number is נח — “Noach, the patriarch of the flood” (Genesis 5:29).
The word that comes out is קט. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 109. A Torah word with the same number is צידה — “food” (Genesis 27:3).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 540. A Torah word with the same number is שמר — “to hedge about” (Genesis 2:15).
The number 54 appears in the classical books 3 times across 3 works. The earliest mention is מגלה עמוקות (~1637).
The name דן appears in the Torah as a word 26 times. The first time is Genesis 14:14. Another 2 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 דן these are ד and נ. The Pentateuch has 3 such verses. The first of them is Leviticus 23:10:
דבר אל בני ישראל ואמרת אלהם כי תבאו אל הארץ אשר אני נתן לכם וקצרתם את קצירה והבאתם את עמר ראשית קצירכם אל הכהן
This is from the portion Emor. What it is about: Laws of the priests; animals without blemish; the calendar of festivals — from the Sabbath to Sukkot; the lamp and the showbread.
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.