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.
Tamar (תמר) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 5 times. First in Genesis 14:7.
Tamar (תמר) — “Date palm.” Judah’s daughter-in-law, from whom David’s royal line descends (Genesis 38); also a daughter of David.
And the same number belongs to the Torah word שמש — “the sun”.
640 and 640.
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.
תכבד העבדה על האנשים ויעשו בה ואל ישעו בדברי שקר
Exodus 5:9
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ת, and ends with the last, ר.
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 640 appears in 21 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.
Tamar — 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.
תמר
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is תמר. “Date palm.” Judah’s daughter-in-law, from whom David’s royal line descends (Genesis 38); also a daughter of David. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 640 — the same as the Torah word שמש, “the sun”. That number points to Torah page 286 of 354 — in the portion Masei. What that portion is about: The forty-two journeys through the desert; the borders of the land; the Levite cities and the cities of refuge. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 5:9. 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 תמר gives 640.
640
The number 640 is the Torah word שמש — «the sun» (Genesis 15:12).
The number 640, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 286 in the book of Bamidbar (Numbers). These are its opening words:
ישב בנגב בארץ כנען בבא בני ישראל ויסעו …
The verse this place falls on is Bamidbar (Numbers) 33:40:
וַיִּשְׁמַע הַכְּנַעֲנִי מֶלֶךְ עֲרָד וְהוּא־יֹשֵׁב בַּנֶּגֶב בְּאֶרֶץ כְּנָעַן בְּבֹא בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל
And the Canaanite, the king of Arad, who dwelt in the South in the land of Canaan, heard of the coming of the children of Israel.--
This is from the portion Masei. What it is about: The forty-two journeys through the desert; the borders of the land; the Levite cities and the cities of refuge.
The same number, 640, is given by these biblical names:
רמת · תמר · שמש · מרת
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) — 640. A Torah word with the same number is שמש — “the sun” (Genesis 15:12).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 10. A Torah word with the same number is בדד — “separate” (Numbers 23:9).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 55. A Torah word with the same number is הלך — “to walk” (Genesis 2:14).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 2435.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 201600.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1480.
The word that comes out is איג. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 14. A Torah word with the same number is יד — “a hand” (Genesis 3:22).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 996.
The number 640 appears in the classical books 16 times across 8 works. The earliest mention is ספר קרניים (~1400).
The name תמר appears in the Torah as a word 5 times. The first time is Genesis 14:7. Another 2 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 תמר these are ת and ר. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Exodus 5:9:
תכבד העבדה על האנשים ויעשו בה ואל ישעו בדברי שקר
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.