The name Barzillai in Hebrew letters is ברזלי. 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.
ברזלי
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is ברזלי. A Tanakh name: the name of three Israelites (first in 2 Samuel 17:27; 12 mentions in the Tanakh). Meaning, per Strong’s dictionary (1890): “iron-hearted”. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 249 — the same as the Torah word טרם, “not yet, before”. That number points to Torah page 249 of 354 — in the portion Shlach. What that portion is about: The twelve spies; forty years for forty days; challah and tzitzit. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 19:1. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Barzillai” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: ברזלי. 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 ברזלי gives 249.
249
The number 249 is the Torah word טרם — «not yet, before» (Genesis 2:5).
and wine for the drink-offering, the fourth part of a hin, shalt thou prepare with the burnt-offering or for the sacrifice, for each lamb.
This is from the portion Shlach. What it is about: The twelve spies; forty years for forty days; challah and tzitzit.
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) — 249. A Torah word with the same number is טרם — “not yet, before” (Genesis 2:5).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 15. A Torah word with the same number is זוב — “to flow” (Exodus 3:8).
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) — 986.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 41053.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 901.
The letters that come out are שגעכמ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 433. A Torah word with the same number is משפחה — “family, clan” (Genesis 8:19).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1083.
The number 249 appears in the classical books 1 time across 1 work. The earliest mention is מעשה רוקח על המשנה (~1740).
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 — 249. 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. ברזלי has 5 letters: ב Bet, ר Resh, ז Zayin, ל Lamed, י Yod. The first letter is Bet, the last is Yod.
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 ברזלי 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 ברזלי these are ב and י. The Pentateuch has 16 such verses. The first of them is Exodus 19:1:
בחדש השלישי לצאת בני ישראל מארץ מצרים ביום הזה באו מדבר סיני
This is from the portion Yitro. What it is about: Jethro's counsel on judges; standing at Sinai; the Ten Utterances; “you shall not make yourself an idol”.
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.
