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.
Zeev (זאב) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 1 time. First in Genesis 49:27.
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.
זה קרבן אהרן ובניו אשר יקריבו לה׳ ביום המשח אתו עשירת האפה סלת מנחה תמיד מחציתה בבקר ומחציתה בערב
Leviticus 6:13
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ז, and ends with the last, ב.
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 10 appears in 13 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.
Zeev — 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.
זאב
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is זאב. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 10 — the same as the Torah word בדד, “separate”. That number points to Torah page 10 of 354 — in the portion Noach. What that portion is about: The flood and the ark; the rainbow as a sign of the covenant; the tower of Babel; ten generations from Noah to Abraham. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Leviticus 6:13. 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 זאב gives 10.
10
The number 10 is the Torah word בדד — «separate» (Numbers 23:9).
The Ten Utterances; ten generations from Adam to Noah and from Noah to Abraham; ten plagues; a minyan.
The number 10, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 10 in the book of Bereshit (Genesis). These are its opening words:
אל התבה להחית אתך זכר ונקבה יהיו מהעוף …
The verse this place falls on is Bereshit (Genesis) 6:19:
וּמִכָּל־הָחַי מִכָּל־בָּשָׂר שְׁנַיִם מִכֹּל תָּבִיא אֶל־הַתֵּבָה לְהַחֲיֹת אִתָּךְ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה יִהְיוּ
And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
This is from the portion Noach. What it is about: The flood and the ark; the rainbow as a sign of the covenant; the tower of Babel; ten generations from Noah to Abraham.
The same number, 10, is given by these biblical names:
זאב · אהד · בדד
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) — 10. A Torah word with the same number is בדד — “separate” (Numbers 23:9).
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) — 10. A Torah word with the same number is בדד — “separate” (Numbers 23:9).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 32. A Torah word with the same number is לב — “the heart” (Genesis 6:5).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 54. A Torah word with the same number is מטה — “a branch” (Genesis 38:18).
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 25. A Torah word with the same number is כה — “like this, i.e. by implication” (Genesis 15:5).
The word that comes out is עתש. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 770. A Torah word with the same number is תשע — “nine or” (Genesis 5:5).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 590. A Torah word with the same number is שרץ — “a swarm, i.e. active mass of minute animals” (Genesis 1:20).
The number 10 appears in the classical books 39 times across 20 works. The earliest mention is ספר חסידים (~1200).
The name זאב appears in the Torah as a word 1 time. The first time is Genesis 49:27.
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 זאב these are ז and ב. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Leviticus 6:13:
זה קרבן אהרן ובניו אשר יקריבו לה׳ ביום המשח אתו עשירת האפה סלת מנחה תמיד מחציתה בבקר ומחציתה בערב
This is from the portion Tzav. What it is about: The fire on the altar is never to go out; the priests' portion; the seven days of consecration of Aaron and his sons.
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.