The name Ashpenaz in Hebrew letters is אשפנז. 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.
אשפנז
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אשפנז. A Tanakh name: a Babylonian eunuch (first in Daniel 1:3; 1 mention in the Tanakh). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 438 — the same as the Torah word תובל, “Tubal, son of Japheth”. That number points to Torah page 84 of 354 — in the portion Vayigash. What that portion is about: Judah pleads for Benjamin; Joseph reveals himself to his brothers; Jacob goes down to Egypt; the family settles in Goshen. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 36:15. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Ashpenaz” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: אשפנז. 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 אשפנז gives 438.
438
The number 438 is the Torah word תובל — «Tubal, son of Japheth» (Genesis 10:2).
And the sons of Joseph, who were born to him in Egypt, were two souls; all the souls of the house of Jacob, that came into Egypt, were threescore and ten.
This is from the portion Vayigash. What it is about: Judah pleads for Benjamin; Joseph reveals himself to his brothers; Jacob goes down to Egypt; the family settles in Goshen.
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) — 438. A Torah word with the same number is תובל — “Tubal, son of Japheth” (Genesis 10:2).
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) — 60. A Torah word with the same number is ילך — “he will go” (Genesis 3:14).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1724.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 98950.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1552.
The letters that come out are תבוטע — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 487. A Torah word with the same number is זפת — “pitch” (Exodus 2:3).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 725. A Torah word with the same number is תקטירו — “you shall burn” (Leviticus 2:11).
The number 438 appears in the classical books 1 time across 1 work. The earliest mention is מגלה עמוקות (~1637).
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 — 438. 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. אשפנז has 5 letters: א Alef, ש Shin, פ Pe, נ Nun, ז Zayin. The first letter is Alef, the last is Zayin.
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 אשפנז 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 אשפנז these are א and ז. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Genesis 36:15:
אלה אלופי בני עשו בני אליפז בכור עשו אלוף תימן אלוף אומר אלוף צפו אלוף קנז
This is from the portion Vayishlach. What it is about: Wrestling with the angel and the name Israel; the meeting with Esau; Dinah in Shechem; the birth of Benjamin and Rachel's death.
A verse whose whole sum equals your name
לבנימן אבידן בן גדעני
Numbers 1:11 · 18 letters in the verse
All the letters of this verse add up to 438 — exactly your name's number. The Pentateuch has 5,853 verses, and only 200 of them fall below 1000. Of the 2,980 names in our index, 80 match this way — about one name in thirty-seven.
«And the sons of Joseph, who were born to him in Egypt, were two souls; all the souls of the house of Jacob, that came into Egypt, were threescore and ten.»
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.
