The name Abel in Hebrew letters is הבל. Below: how its number adds up, which page of the Torah it falls on and what verse stands there. Everything is computed, nothing is guessed.
הבל
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is הבל. A Tanakh name: a son of Adam (first in Genesis 4:2; 8 mentions in the Tanakh). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 37 — the same as the Torah word גדל, “to grow, be great”. That number points to Torah page 37 of 354 — in the portion Chayei Sarah. What that portion is about: Sarah's death and the purchase of the cave of Machpelah; the servant seeks a wife for Isaac; Rebecca at the well; Abraham's death. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 17:6. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Abel” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: הבל. A name from the Tanakh — its Tanakh spelling is used. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
Adding up the letters of the name הבל gives 37.
37
The number 37 is the Torah word גדל — «to grow, be great» (Genesis 12:2).
And the man came into the house, and he ungirded the camels; and he gave straw and provender for the camels, and water to wash his feet and the feet of the men that were with him.
This is from the portion Chayei Sarah. What it is about: Sarah's death and the purchase of the cave of Machpelah; the servant seeks a wife for Isaac; Rebecca at the well; Abraham's death.
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) — 37. A Torah word with the same number is גדל — “to grow, be great” (Genesis 12:2).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 10. A Torah word with the same number is בדד — “alone” (Numbers 23:9).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 19. A Torah word with the same number is גוי — “nation” (Genesis 10:5).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 123.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 929. A Torah word with the same number is יגרשהדותא — “Jegar-sahadutha, heap of witness” (Genesis 31:47).
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 49. A Torah word with the same number is מואב — “Moab, son of Lot” (Genesis 19:37).
The letters that come out are צשכ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 410. A Torah word with the same number is שמע — “to hear” (Genesis 3:8).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 492. A Torah word with the same number is סבלת — “burdens” (Exodus 6:6).
The number 37 appears in the classical books 34 times across 18 works. The earliest mention is עולם אחד (~1480?).
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 — 37. The channel posts one number a day, one verse and the Torah page it lands on. Nothing after it, no mailing list.
Hebrew is written from right to left. הבל has 3 letters: ה He, ב Bet, ל Lamed. The first letter is He, the last is Lamed.
For an engraving, a sign or a tattoo, show the spelling to someone who reads Hebrew: transliterating a name is a choice, not the only option.
The name הבל appears in the Torah as a word 7 times. The first time is Genesis 4:2. Another 1 time 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 הבל these are ה and ל. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Exodus 17:6:
הנני עמד לפניך שם על הצור בחרב והכית בצור ויצאו ממנו מים ושתה העם ויעש כן משה לעיני זקני ישראל
This is from the portion Beshalach. What it is about: The parting of the sea and the song of Moses and Miriam; manna and quail; water from the rock; the war with Amalek.
The name הבל has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 37 is not among them. Half of all names are like this — neither good nor bad, just a fact of counting.
Add a date of birth and the verse of meeting from that week's portion is added to the reading.
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.
