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.
Jonathan (יונתן) — “The Lord has given.” Son of King Saul and David’s closest friend (1 Samuel 18–20).
And the same number belongs to the Torah word גרגשי — “a Girgashite, one of the native tribes of Canaan”.
516 and 516.
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.
יששכר זבולן ובנימן
Exodus 1:3
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, י, and ends with the last, נ.
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 516 appears in 26 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.
Jonathan — 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.
יונתן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is יונתן. “The Lord has given.” Son of King Saul and David’s closest friend (1 Samuel 18–20). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 516 — the same as the Torah word גרגשי, “a Girgashite, one of the native tribes of Canaan”. That number points to Torah page 162 of 354 — in the portion Pekudei. What that portion is about: The accounting of the materials; the priestly garments are finished; the Tabernacle is raised on the first of Nisan; the cloud covers it. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 1:3. 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 יונתן gives 516.
516
The number 516 is the Torah word גרגשי — «a Girgashite, one of the native tribes of Canaan» (Genesis 10:16).
The number 516, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 162 in the book of Shmot (Exodus). These are its opening words:
הזהב על שתי הטבעת על קצות החשן ואת …
The verse this place falls on is Shmot (Exodus) 39:17:
וַיִּתְּנוּ שְׁתֵּי הָעֲבֹתֹת הַזָּהָב עַל־שְׁתֵּי הַטַּבָּעֹת עַל־קְצוֹת הַחֹשֶׁן
And they put the two wreathen chains of gold on the two rings at the ends of the breastplate.
This is from the portion Pekudei. What it is about: The accounting of the materials; the priestly garments are finished; the Tabernacle is raised on the first of Nisan; the cloud covers it.
The same number, 516, is given by these biblical names:
יונתן · אשירה · כסולת · שפופן
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) — 1166.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 21. A Torah word with the same number is אך — “a particle of affirmation, surely” (Genesis 7:23).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 66. A Torah word with the same number is כמו — “a form of the prefix 'k-', but used separately…” (Genesis 19:15).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1961.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 165136.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1074.
The word that comes out is מפטאט. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 139. A Torah word with the same number is לקט — “to pick up, i.e.” (Genesis 31:46).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 650. A Torah word with the same number is שלישי — “third” (Genesis 1:13).
The number 516 appears in the classical books 2 times across 2 works. The earliest mention is בעל הטורים על התורה (~1300).
The name יונתן 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 יונתן these are י and נ. The Pentateuch has 4 such verses. The first of them is Exodus 1:3:
יששכר זבולן ובנימן
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.
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.