SAPIR 861

How your name is written in the letters of the Torah

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

Rosh

Tap the letters of your name and add up its number yourself

The number of your name

Rosh (ראש) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 58 times. First in Genesis 3:15.

Rosh (ראש) — A Tanakh name: an Israelite; also a foreign nation (first in Genesis 46:21; 1 mention in the Tanakh).
And the same number belongs to the Torah word אשר — “who, which, that”.

Your word in the Torah

The word אשר — “who, which, that” — has the same number as your name. Here is the verse where it first appears:

ויעש אלהים את הרקיע ויבדל בין המים אשר מתחת לרקיע ובין המים אשר מעל לרקיע ויהי כן

Genesis 1:7

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.

ראו הפלתי לכם את הגוים הנשארים האלה בנחלה לשבטיכם מן הירדן וכל הגוים אשר הכרתי והים הגדול מבוא השמש

Joshua 23:4

The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ר, and ends with the last, ש.

The Pentateuch has no verse that begins with ר and ends with ש. The custom allows the whole Tanakh — and there it is: Joshua 23:4.

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

Torah portions with a word of number 501: 45 of 54

You are not alone in this number

The same number belongs to these names:

Asher Ethnan Ilanit Jathniel Ruperto Shearjashub Tamuna

How to read your number

Fact. The letters of the name ראש add up to 501. Plain addition — you can check it yourself.

Meaning. There is a Torah word with the same number — אשר (“who, which, that”). A matching sum does not mean the word is 'about you'; it is a reason to look at what in it matters to you.

A question for yourself. What in this do you recognise in yourself — and what would you like to strengthen?

Practice. This week: open the verse of your name, read it slowly three times and write down one thought that stays with you.

What next

This card is free.

Full name reading, PDF · ₪59

The Family Book · ₪199

Hand-made reading — done personally · ₪390

Card, Bit, Apple Pay, Google Pay · PDF right after payment

The nine numbers of your name

501standard501with finals6reduced42ordinal1891cumulative130001squares902building405atbash981filling

The tradition counts a name in nine ways, each giving its own number. 5 of the nine have a word of their own in the Torah. We showed one. The rest are in the full report.

A verse for what you need

Pick a theme — we show a Tanakh verse on it that contains a word with your name's number (501).

Our verse — for two

Type the name of someone close. We find the verse that begins with a letter of one name and ends with a letter of the other — your pair's verse.

My days of the year

The days when the number of the Hebrew date equals your name's number, and the Shabbat when the world reads the portion of your verse — straight into your phone's calendar.

Add my days to the calendar

7 days with your verse

Every morning in Telegram — your verse, how to read it in Latin letters, and one new word. Half a minute a day. After seven days the verse stays with you.

Start in Telegram

Full report — free for the first hundred Send the verse of my name to Telegramfree, one tap

ראש

Spelling attested: this is how the name is recorded in the open Wikidata name base.

In short

Your name in Hebrew letters is ראש. A Tanakh name: an Israelite; also a foreign nation (first in Genesis 46:21; 1 mention in the Tanakh). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 501 — the same as the Torah word אשר, “who, which, that”. That number points to Torah page 147 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 Joshua 23:4. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.

You wrote “Rosh” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: ראש. A name from the Tanakh — its Tanakh spelling is used. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.

Adding up the letters of the name ראש gives 501.

501

The number 501 is the Torah word אשר — «who, which, that» (Genesis 1:7).

✓ Verify

This number is shared with 2 other name(s) out of the 2,980 in the index.

The number 501, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 147 in the book of Shmot (Exodus).

The verse this place falls on is Shmot (Exodus) 32:1:

וַיַּרְא הָעָם כִּי־בֹשֵׁשׁ מֹשֶׁה לָרֶדֶת מִן־הָהָר וַיִּקָּהֵל הָעָם עַל־אַהֲרֹן וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֵלָיו קוּם עֲשֵׂה־לָנוּ אֱלֹהִים אֲשֶׁר יֵלְכוּ לְפָנֵינוּ כִּי־זֶה מֹשֶׁה הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלָנוּ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לֹא יָדַעְנוּ מֶה־הָיָה לוֹ

And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him: 'Up, make us a god who shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him.'

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, 501, is given by these Tanakh names:

Asher אשר

Other 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) — 501. A Torah word with the same number is אשר — “who, which, that” (Genesis 1:7).

Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 6. A Torah word with the same number is בד — “alone, apart” (Genesis 2:18).

Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 42. A Torah word with the same number is חדל — “to cease” (Genesis 11:8).

Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1891.

Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 130001.

Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 902.

The letters that come out are גתב — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 405. A Torah word with the same number is שקה — “to water, give drink” (Genesis 2:6).

Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 981.

The number 501 appears in the classical books 13 times across 10 works. The earliest mention is בעל הטורים על התורה (~1300).

The name ראש appears in the Torah as a word 58 times. The first time is Genesis 3:15. Another 18 times it stands with prefixes — “and”, “in”, “the”.

The verse of your name

The Pentateuch has no verse that begins with ר and ends with ש. The custom allows the whole Tanakh — the Prophets and the Writings have 7 such verses. The first of them is Joshua 23:4:

ראו הפלתי לכם את הגוים הנשארים האלה בנחלה לשבטיכם מן הירדן וכל הגוים אשר הכרתי והים הגדול מבוא השמש

Name report — free for the first hundred Name and date

The full message

Every letter of the name explained, the words and namesakes with references, the Hebrew date, the letter and tribe of the month, day 861 of your life (±1), the psalm by age, the attestations from the classical books — a PDF sent to your email.

The number of the day, every morning

Every date has a number too. Once a year it will match the number of your name — 501. The channel posts one number a day, one verse and the Torah page it lands on. Nothing after it, no mailing list.

Open the channel

Your name's day

The name ראש has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 501 is not among them. Half of all names are like this — neither good nor bad, just a fact of counting.

How it is counted

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.

Binyamin Pichkhadze, «Chumash 354» (חומש 354), Bnei Brak, 2002 · Addition, not prophecy.

Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (WLC), CC BY 4.0

Your name is already a message

How your name is written in the letters of the Torah