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.
Joel (יואל) — “The Lord is God.” The prophet whose book is among the Twelve Minor Prophets.
And the same number belongs to the Torah word אולי — “if not”.
47 and 47.
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 47 appears in 12 of the 54 weekly portions. That is a rare number: most numbers appear more often.
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.
Joel — 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.
יואל
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is יואל. “The Lord is God.” The prophet whose book is among the Twelve Minor Prophets. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 47 — the same as the Torah word אולי, “if not”. That number points to Torah page 47 of 354 — in the portion Vayetzei. What that portion is about: The dream of the ladder to heaven; Jacob with Laban: Leah and Rachel; eleven sons are born; the return. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Deuteronómio 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 יואל gives 47.
47
The number 47 is the Torah word אולי — «if not» (Genesis 16:2).
The number 47, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 47 in the book of Bereshit (Genesis). These are its opening words:
ההוא בית אל ואולם לוז שם העיר לראשנה …
The verse this place falls on is Bereshit (Genesis) 28:19:
וַיִּקְרָא אֶת־שֵׁם־הַמָּקוֹם הַהוּא בֵּית־אֵל וְאוּלָם לוּז שֵׁם־הָעִיר לָרִאשֹׁנָה
And he called the name of that place Beth-el, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.
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.
The same number, 47, is given by these biblical names:
יואל · אולי · חלדה · במה
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) — 47. A Torah word with the same number is אולי — “if not” (Genesis 16:2).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 11. A Torah word with the same number is חג — “a festival, or a victim therefor” (Exodus 10:9).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 29. A Torah word with the same number is דכה — “mutilated” (Deuteronomy 23:2).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 182. A Torah word with the same number is יעקב — “Jaakob, the Israelitish patriarch” (Genesis 25:26).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 1037.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 90. A Torah word with the same number is מן — “a part of” (Genesis 2:6).
The word that comes out is מפתכ. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 540. A Torah word with the same number is שמר — “to hedge about” (Genesis 2:15).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 217. A Torah word with the same number is אורי — “Uri, the name of three Israelites” (Exodus 31:2).
The number 47 appears in the classical books 6 times across 6 works. The earliest mention is ילקוט שמעוני (~1260).
The name יואל does not stand as a separate word in the Torah, but appears 1 time with prefixes — first in Êxodo 2:21.
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 יואל these are י and ל. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Deuteronómio 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.