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.
Nathan (נתן) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 109 times. First in Genesis 9:12.
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.
נגע צרעת כי תהיה באדם והובא אל הכהן
Leviticus 13:9
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, נ, 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 500 appears in 48 of the 54 weekly portions. That is a common number — it is in most 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.
Nathan — 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.
נתן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is נתן. “He gave.” The prophet at David’s court who rebuked the king after Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 500 — the same as the Torah word נתן, “to give, used with greatest latitude of…”. That number points to Torah page 146 of 354 — in the portion Ki Tisa. What that portion is about: The half-shekel for the census; the golden calf and the broken tablets; the thirteen attributes of mercy; the second tablets. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Leviticus 13:9. 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 נתן gives 500.
500
The number 500 is the Torah word נתן — «to give, used with greatest latitude of…» (Genesis 1:17).
Five hundred is final kaf in the extended count; “the tree of life is a five-hundred-year journey” (Genesis Rabbah 15:6).
The number 500, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 146 in the book of Shmot (Exodus). These are its opening words:
אורי בן חור למטה יהודה ואמלא אתו רוח …
The verse this place falls on is Shmot (Exodus) 31:2:
רְאֵה קָרָאתִי בְשֵׁם בְּצַלְאֵל בֶּן־אוּרִי בֶן־חוּר לְמַטֵּה יְהוּדָה
'See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah;
This is from the portion Ki Tisa. What it is about: The half-shekel for the census; the golden calf and the broken tablets; the thirteen attributes of mercy; the second tablets.
The same number, 500, is given by these biblical names:
נתן · תימן · שר · מתני
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) — 1150.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 14. A Torah word with the same number is יד — “a hand” (Genesis 3:22).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 50. A Torah word with the same number is כל — “the whole” (Genesis 1:21).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1885.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 165000.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1000.
The word that comes out is טאט. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 19. A Torah word with the same number is גוי — “a foreign nation” (Genesis 10:5).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 618.
The number 500 appears in the classical books 17 times across 8 works. The earliest mention is ספר קרניים (~1400).
The name נתן appears in the Torah as a word 109 times. The first time is Genesis 9:12. Another 39 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 נתן these are נ and נ. The Pentateuch has 3 such verses. The first of them is Leviticus 13:9:
נגע צרעת כי תהיה באדם והובא אל הכהן
This is from the portion Tazria. What it is about: The woman after childbirth; the laws of tzaraat on skin and garments — the signs and the priest's inspection.
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.