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.
Ishmael (ישמעאל) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 13 times. First in Genesis 16:11.
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.
יהושע בן נון העמד לפניך הוא יבא שמה אתו חזק כי הוא ינחלנה את ישראל
Deuteronomy 1:38
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, י, and ends with the last, ל.
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 451 appears in 37 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.
Ishmael — 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.
ישמעאל
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is ישמעאל. “God will hear” (Genesis 16:11). Son of Abraham and Hagar. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 451 — the same as the Torah word ישמעאל, “Jishmael, the name of Abraham's oldest son, and…”. That number points to Torah page 97 of 354 — in the portion Shemot. What that portion is about: Slavery in Egypt; Moses in the basket on the Nile; the burning bush and the Name; the first audience with Pharaoh. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Deuteronomy 1:38. 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 ישמעאל gives 451.
451
The number 451 is the Torah word ישמעאל — «Jishmael, the name of Abraham's oldest son, and…» (Genesis 16:11).
The number 451, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 97 in the book of Shmot (Exodus). These are its opening words:
ואנכי אהיה עם פיך ועם פיהו והוריתי אתכם …
The verse this place falls on is Shmot (Exodus) 4:15:
וְדִבַּרְתָּ אֵלָיו וְשַׂמְתָּ אֶת־הַדְּבָרִים בְּפִיו וְאָנֹכִי אֶהְיֶה עִם־פִּיךָ וְעִם־פִּיהוּ וְהוֹרֵיתִי אֶתְכֶם אֵת אֲשֶׁר תַּעֲשׂוּן
And thou shalt speak unto him, and put the words in his mouth; and I will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you what ye shall do.
This is from the portion Shemot. What it is about: Slavery in Egypt; Moses in the basket on the Nile; the burning bush and the Name; the first audience with Pharaoh.
The same number, 451, is given by these biblical names:
ישמעאל · אלישמע · תימא · אמתי
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) — 451. A Torah word with the same number is ישמעאל — “Jishmael, the name of Abraham's oldest son, and…” (Genesis 16:11).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 19. A Torah word with the same number is גוי — “a foreign nation” (Genesis 10:5).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 73. A Torah word with the same number is גמל — “a camel” (Genesis 12:16).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1726.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 97501.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1962.
The word that comes out is מביזתכ. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 479.
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 775.
The number 451 appears in the classical books 6 times across 4 works. The earliest mention is מדרש לפירושים (~1450?).
The name ישמעאל appears in the Torah as a word 13 times. The first time is Genesis 16:11. 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 ישמעאל these are י and ל. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Deuteronomy 1:38:
יהושע בן נון העמד לפניך הוא יבא שמה אתו חזק כי הוא ינחלנה את ישראל
This is from the portion Devarim. What it is about: Moses begins his address in the plains of Moab: judges, spies, forty years of wandering, the victories over Sihon and Og.
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.