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.
Eleazar (אלעזר) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 30 times. First in Exodus 6:23.
Eleazar (אלעזר) — “God has helped.” Son of Aaron, the second High Priest (Numbers 20:28).
And the same number belongs to the Torah word שוב — “to turn back”.
308 and 308.
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.
אדני שמעני ארץ ארבע מאת שקל כסף ביני ובינך מה הוא ואת מתך קבר
Genesis 23:15
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, א, and ends with the last, ר.
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 308 appears in 44 of the 54 weekly portions. That is a common number — it is in most 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.
Eleazar — 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.
אלעזר
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אלעזר. “God has helped.” Son of Aaron, the second High Priest (Numbers 20:28). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 308 — the same as the Torah word שוב, “to turn back”. That number points to Torah page 308 of 354 — in the portion Eikev. What that portion is about: “Because you will heed”: the land of seven fruits; the blessing after meals; manna as a test; the second paragraph of the Shema. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 23:15. 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 אלעזר gives 308.
308
The number 308 is the Torah word שוב — «to turn back» (Genesis 3:19).
The number 308, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 308 in the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy). These are its opening words:
את המן אשר לא ידעת ולא ידעון אבתיך …
The verse this place falls on is Devarim (Deuteronomy) 8:3:
וַיְעַנְּךָ וַיַּרְעִבֶךָ וַיַּאֲכִלְךָ אֶת הַמָּן אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָדַעְתָּ וְלֹא יָדְעוּן אֲבֹתֶיךָ לְמַעַן הוֹדִעֲךָ כִּי לֹא עַל־הַלֶּחֶם לְבַדּוֹ יִחְיֶה הָאָדָם כִּי עַל־כָּל־מוֹצָא פִי־ה׳ יִחְיֶה הָאָדָם
And He afflicted thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of HaShem doth man live.
This is from the portion Eikev. What it is about: “Because you will heed”: the land of seven fruits; the blessing after meals; manna as a test; the second paragraph of the Shema.
The same number, 308, is given by these biblical names:
אלעזר · קרח · עזראל · חש
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) — 308. A Torah word with the same number is שוב — “to turn back” (Genesis 3:19).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 20. A Torah word with the same number is היה — “to exist, i.e. be or become, come to pass” (Genesis 1:2).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 56. A Torah word with the same number is יום — “a day” (Genesis 1:5).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1254.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 45850.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 549.
The word that comes out is תכזעג. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 500. A Torah word with the same number is נתן — “to give, used with greatest latitude of…” (Genesis 1:17).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 892.
The number 308 appears in the classical books 3 times across 3 works. The earliest mention is שער הפסוקים (~1573).
The name אלעזר appears in the Torah as a word 30 times. The first time is Exodus 6:23. Another 12 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 אלעזר these are א and ר. The Pentateuch has 15 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 23:15:
אדני שמעני ארץ ארבע מאת שקל כסף ביני ובינך מה הוא ואת מתך קבר
This is from the portion Chayei Sarah. What it is about: Sarah's death and the purchase of the cave of Machpelah; the servant seeks a wife for Isaac; Rebecca at the well; Abraham'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.