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.
Ephraim (אפרים) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 22 times. First in Genesis 41:52.
Ephraim (אפרים) — “Fruitful” (Genesis 41:52). Joseph’s younger son, whom Jacob blessed before the elder (Genesis 48).
And the same number belongs to the Torah word שאל — “to inquire”.
331 and 331.
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 תולדות השמים והארץ בהבראם ביום עשות ה׳ אלהים ארץ ושמים
Genesis 2:4
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, א, and ends with the last, מ.
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 331 appears in 22 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.
Ephraim — 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.
אפרים
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אפרים. “Fruitful” (Genesis 41:52). Joseph’s younger son, whom Jacob blessed before the elder (Genesis 48). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 331 — the same as the Torah word שאל, “to inquire”. That number points to Torah page 331 of 354 — in the portion Ki Teitzei. What that portion is about: “When you go out”: seventy-four commandments — the bird's nest, honest weights, divorce, remembering Amalek. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Берешит 2:4. 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 אפרים gives 331.
331
The number 331 is the Torah word שאל — «to inquire» (Genesis 24:47).
The number 331, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 331 in the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy). These are its opening words:
או שורו נפלים בדרך והתעלמת מהם הקם תקים …
The verse this place falls on is Devarim (Deuteronomy) 22:4:
לֹא־תִרְאֶה אֶת־חֲמוֹר אָחִיךָ אוֹ שׁוֹרוֹ נֹפְלִים בַּדֶּרֶךְ וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ מֵהֶם הָקֵם תָּקִים עִמּוֹ ס
Thou shalt not see thy brother's ass or his ox fallen down by the way, and hide thyself from them; thou shalt surely help him to lift them up again.
This is from the portion Ki Teitzei. What it is about: “When you go out”: seventy-four commandments — the bird's nest, honest weights, divorce, remembering Amalek.
The same number, 331, is given by these biblical names:
אפרים · אכיש · סיסרא · רפאים
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) — 891.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 16. A Torah word with the same number is אחז — “to seize” (Genesis 22:13).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 61. A Torah word with the same number is אני — “I” (Genesis 6:17).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1401.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 48101.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 985.
The word that comes out is תוגמי. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 459.
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 802.
The number 331 appears in the classical books 9 times across 7 works. The earliest mention is בעל הטורים על התורה (~1300).
The name אפרים appears in the Torah as a word 22 times. The first time is Берешит 41:52. Another 4 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 אפרים these are א and מ. The Pentateuch has 83 such verses. The first of them is Берешит 2:4:
אלה תולדות השמים והארץ בהבראם ביום עשות ה׳ אלהים ארץ ושמים
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.
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.