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
Zenaida
Tap the letters of your name and add up its number yourself
0
The number of your name
Zenaida (זנאיידה) — This name comes from Greek. And the same number belongs to the Torah word נבלה — “carcass”.
Your word in the Torah
The word נבלה — “carcass” — has the same number as your name. Here is the verse where it first appears:
הבה נרדה ונבלה שם שפתם אשר לא ישמעו איש שפת רעהו
Genesis 11:7
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.
זה יתנו כל העבר על הפקדים מחצית השקל בשקל הקדש עשרים גרה השקל מחצית השקל תרומה לה׳
Exodus 30:13
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, ז, and ends with the last, ה.
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 87: 30 of 54
A word with the number 87 appears in 30 of the 54 weekly portions.
Fact. The letters of the name זנאיידה add up to 87. Plain addition — you can check it yourself.
Meaning. There is a Torah word with the same number — נבלה (“carcass”). 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.
The tradition counts a name in nine ways, each giving its own number. 8 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 (87).
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.
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.
Your name in Hebrew letters is זנאיידה. This name comes from Greek. Its source is the word or name Zeus, which means “belonging to Zeus”; today it is mostly found in Spain and Latin America. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 87 — the same as the Torah word נבלה, “carcass”. That number points to Torah page 87 of 354 — in the portion Vayechi. What that portion is about: Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh and all his sons; Jacob's death and burial in Hebron; Joseph's death. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 30:13. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Zenaida” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: זנאיידה. Spelled by the Academy of the Hebrew Language rules for foreign names. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
Adding up the letters of the name זנאיידה gives 87.
87
The number 87 is the Torah word נבלה — «carcass» (Leviticus 5:2).
and said unto me: Behold, I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and I will make of thee a company of peoples; and will give this land to thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession.
This is from the portion Vayechi. What it is about: Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh and all his sons; Jacob's death and burial in Hebron; Joseph's death.
The same number, 87, is given by these Tanakh names:
Alon אלון
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) — 87. A Torah word with the same number is נבלה — “carcass” (Leviticus 5:2).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 24. A Torah word with the same number is חוי — “Hivite” (Genesis 10:17).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 51. A Torah word with the same number is אכל — “to eat” (Genesis 2:16).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 359. A Torah word with the same number is נטש — “to leave, allow” (Genesis 31:28).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 2791.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 437. A Torah word with the same number is משבצה — “filigree setting” (Exodus 28:11).
The letters that come out are עטתממקצ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 749. A Torah word with the same number is תשמט — “you shall release” (Deuteronomy 15:3).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 764. A Torah word with the same number is ונחשת — “and bronze” (Exodus 25:3).
The number 87 appears in the classical books 24 times across 12 works. The earliest mention is ספר קרניים (~1400).
The name זנאיידה 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 זנאיידה these are ז and ה. The Pentateuch has 8 such verses. The first of them is Exodus 30:13:
זה יתנו כל העבר על הפקדים מחצית השקל בשקל הקדש עשרים גרה השקל מחצית השקל תרומה לה׳
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.
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 — 87. The channel posts one number a day, one verse and the Torah page it lands on. Nothing after it, no mailing list.
Any name written in Hebrew letters is a number: זנאיידה = 87. And every date has a number of its own. There is a day in the year when the two coincide.
«and said unto me: Behold, I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and I will make of thee a company of peoples; and will give this land to thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession.»
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.