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.
Ruth (רות) — Perhaps “friend.” The Moabite woman who followed her mother-in-law Naomi to Bethlehem; great-grandmother of David. The book of Ruth is read on Shavuot.
And the same number belongs to the Torah word תור — “to meander”.
606 and 606.
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.
ראה נתן ה׳ אלהיך לפניך את הארץ עלה רש כאשר דבר ה׳ אלהי אבתיך לך אל תירא ואל תחת
Deuteronomy 1:21
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ר, and ends with the last, ת.
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 606 appears in 32 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.
Ruth — 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.
רות
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is רות. Perhaps “friend.” The Moabite woman who followed her mother-in-law Naomi to Bethlehem; great-grandmother of David. The book of Ruth is read on Shavuot. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 606 — the same as the Torah word תור, “to meander”. That number points to Torah page 252 of 354 — in the portion Korach. What that portion is about: Korah's rebellion; Aaron's staff blossoms; the duties of the priests and Levites; the priestly gifts. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Deuteronomy 1:21. 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 רות gives 606.
606
The number 606 is the Torah word תור — «to meander» (Numbers 10:33).
The number 606, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 252 in the book of Bamidbar (Numbers). These are its opening words:
וכל עדתך היו לפני יהוה אתה והם ואהרן …
The verse this place falls on is Bamidbar (Numbers) 16:16:
וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה אֶל־קֹרַח אַתָּה וְכָל־עֲדָתְךָ הֱיוּ לִפְנֵי ה׳ אַתָּה וָהֵם וְאַהֲרֹן מָחָר
And Moses said unto Korah: 'Be thou and all thy congregation before HaShem, thou, and they, and Aaron, to-morrow;
This is from the portion Korach. What it is about: Korah's rebellion; Aaron's staff blossoms; the duties of the priests and Levites; the priestly gifts.
The same number, 606, is given by these biblical names:
רות · תחפנחס · דברת
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) — 606. A Torah word with the same number is תור — “to meander” (Numbers 10:33).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 12. A Torah word with the same number is הוא — “she or it)” (Genesis 2:11).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 48. A Torah word with the same number is יובל — “the blast of a horn” (Exodus 19:13).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 2311.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 200036.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1012. A Torah word with the same number is תרבית — “multiplication, i.e. percentage or bonus in…” (Leviticus 25:36).
The word that comes out is גפא. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 84. A Torah word with the same number is ידע — “to know” (Genesis 3:5).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 928.
The number 606 appears in the classical books 5 times across 4 works. The earliest mention is מדרש לפירושים (~1450?).
The name רות 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 רות these are ר and ת. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Deuteronomy 1:21:
ראה נתן ה׳ אלהיך לפניך את הארץ עלה רש כאשר דבר ה׳ אלהי אבתיך לך אל תירא ואל תחת
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.