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.
Ezra (עזרא) — “Help.” The scribe and priest who restored the Torah to the center of life after the exile (Ezra).
And the same number belongs to the Torah word עבור — “crossed, i.e.”.
278 and 278.
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.
עודנו מדבר עמם ורחל באה עם הצאן אשר לאביה כי רעה הוא
Genesis 29:9
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ע, and ends with the last, א.
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 278 appears in 33 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.
Ezra — 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.
עזרא
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is עזרא. “Help.” The scribe and priest who restored the Torah to the center of life after the exile (Ezra). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 278 — the same as the Torah word עבור, “crossed, i.e.”. That number points to Torah page 278 of 354 — in the portion Matot. What that portion is about: Vows and their annulment; the war with Midian; the tribes of Reuben and Gad ask for land beyond the Jordan. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 29:9. 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 עזרא gives 278.
278
The number 278 is the Torah word עבור — «crossed, i.e.» (Genesis 3:17).
The number 278, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 278 in the book of Bamidbar (Numbers). These are its opening words:
ישראל לאמר זה הדבר אשר צוה יהוה איש …
The verse this place falls on is Bamidbar (Numbers) 30:2:
וַיְדַבֵּר מֹשֶׁה אֶל־רָאשֵׁי הַמַּטּוֹת לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר זֶה הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר צִוָּה ה׳
And Moses spoke unto the heads of the tribes of the children of Israel, saying: This is the thing which HaShem hath commanded.
This is from the portion Matot. What it is about: Vows and their annulment; the war with Midian; the tribes of Reuben and Gad ask for land beyond the Jordan.
The same number, 278, is given by these biblical names:
עזרא · בעור · עורב · הארבע
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) — 278. A Torah word with the same number is עבור — “crossed, i.e.” (Genesis 3:17).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 17. A Torah word with the same number is טוב — “good” (Genesis 1:4).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 44. A Torah word with the same number is ילד — “to bear young” (Genesis 3:16).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1149.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 44950.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 702. A Torah word with the same number is שבת — “intermission, i.e” (Exodus 16:23).
The word that comes out is זעגת. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 480. A Torah word with the same number is עדות — “testimony” (Exodus 16:34).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 818. A Torah word with the same number is תחתי — “lowermost” (Genesis 6:16).
The number 278 appears in the classical books 44 times across 6 works. The earliest mention is בעל הטורים על התורה (~1300).
The name עזרא 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 עזרא these are ע and א. The Pentateuch has 7 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 29:9:
עודנו מדבר עמם ורחל באה עם הצאן אשר לאביה כי רעה הוא
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.
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.