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.
Shaked (שקד) — “Almond.” Aaron’s staff blossomed and bore almonds (Numbers 17:23).
And the same number belongs to the Torah word קדש — “a sacred place or thing”.
404 and 404.
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.
שמע ישראל ה׳ אלהינו ה׳ אחד
Deuteronomy 6:4
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ש, and ends with the last, ד.
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 404 appears in 38 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.
Shaked — The customary Hebrew spelling of this name. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
שקד
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is שקד. “Almond.” Aaron’s staff blossomed and bore almonds (Numbers 17:23). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 404 — the same as the Torah word קדש, “a sacred place or thing”. That number points to Torah page 50 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 Deuteronomy 6:4. 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 שקד gives 404.
404
The number 404 is the Torah word קדש — «a sacred place or thing» (Exodus 3:5).
The number 404, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 50 in the book of Bereshit (Genesis). These are its opening words:
בדודאי בני וישכב עמה בלילה הוא וישמע אלהים …
The verse this place falls on is Bereshit (Genesis) 30:16:
וַיָּבֹא יַעֲקֹב מִן־הַשָּׂדֶה בָּעֶרֶב וַתֵּצֵא לֵאָה לִקְרָאתוֹ וַתֹּאמֶר אֵלַי תָּבוֹא כִּי שָׂכֹר שְׂכַרְתִּיךָ בְּדוּדָאֵי בְּנִי וַיִּשְׁכַּב עִמָּהּ בַּלַּיְלָה הוּא
And Jacob came from the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said: 'Thou must come in unto me; for I have surely hired thee with my son's mandrakes.' And he lay with her that night.
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, 404, is given by these biblical names:
קדש · שפטיה · בקבקר · חשמון
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) — 404. A Torah word with the same number is קדש — “a sacred place or thing” (Exodus 3:5).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 8. A Torah word with the same number is אהב — “to have affection for” (Genesis 22:2).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 44. A Torah word with the same number is ילד — “to bear young” (Genesis 3:16).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1700.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 100016.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1104.
The word that comes out is בדק. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 106. A Torah word with the same number is נון — “Nun or Non, the father of Joshua” (Exodus 33:11).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 980. A Torah word with the same number is משמרת — “watch, i.e. the act” (Genesis 26:5).
The number 404 appears in the classical books 3 times across 3 works. The earliest mention is שער הפסוקים (~1573).
The name שקד 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 שקד these are ש and ד. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Deuteronomy 6:4:
שמע ישראל ה׳ אלהינו ה׳ אחד
This is from the portion Vaetchanan. What it is about: Moses pleads to enter the land; the Ten Utterances repeated; “Hear, O Israel”; the warning against forgetting.
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.