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 6. The Torah word בד — “separation” — 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.
דבר נא באזני העם וישאלו איש מאת רעהו ואשה מאת רעותה כלי כסף וכלי זהב
Exodus 11:2
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ד, and ends with the last, ב.
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 6 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.
Dov — 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.
דב
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is דב. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 6 — the same as the Torah word בד, “separation”. That number points to Torah page 6 of 354 — in the portion Bereshit. What that portion is about: Creation in six days and the Sabbath; Adam and Eve in the garden; Cain and Abel; ten generations to Noah. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 11:2. 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 דב gives 6.
6
The number 6 is the Torah word בד — «separation» (Genesis 2:18).
Six days of creation; six orders of the Mishnah.
The number 6, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 6 in the book of Bereshit (Genesis). These are its opening words:
ויבא קין מפרי האדמה מנחה ליהוה והבל הביא …
The verse this place falls on is Bereshit (Genesis) 4:3:
וַיְהִי מִקֵּץ יָמִים וַיָּבֵא קַיִן מִפְּרִי הָאֲדָמָה מִנְחָה לַה׳
And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto HaShem.
This is from the portion Bereshit. What it is about: Creation in six days and the Sabbath; Adam and Eve in the garden; Cain and Abel; ten generations to Noah.
The same number, 6, is given by these Torah words:
בד · גג
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) — 6. A Torah word with the same number is בד — “separation” (Genesis 2:18).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 6. A Torah word with the same number is בד — “separation” (Genesis 2:18).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 6. A Torah word with the same number is בד — “separation” (Genesis 2:18).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 13. A Torah word with the same number is אחד — “united, i.e. one” (Genesis 1:5).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 20. A Torah word with the same number is היה — “to exist, i.e. be or become, come to pass” (Genesis 1:2).
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 10. A Torah word with the same number is בדד — “separate” (Numbers 23:9).
The word that comes out is קש. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 400. A Torah word with the same number is שנים — “two” (Genesis 1:16).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 846.
The number 6 appears in the classical books 22 times across 20 works. The earliest mention is ספר קרניים (~1400).
The name דב 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 דב these are ד and ב. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Exodus 11:2:
דבר נא באזני העם וישאלו איש מאת רעהו ואשה מאת רעותה כלי כסף וכלי זהב
This is from the portion Bo. What it is about: Locusts, darkness and the death of the firstborn; the Passover lamb; the exodus from Egypt; the commandment of tefillin.
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.