The name Ben in Hebrew letters is בן. 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.
בן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is בן. In Hebrew letters the name is spelled like the Tanakh name Ben: an Israelite (1 Chronicles 15:18). This is a shared spelling, not the origin of the name. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 52 — the same as the Torah word בן, “son”. That number points to Torah page 52 of 354 — in the portion Vayetzei. What that portion is about: The dream of the ladder to heaven; Jacob with Laban: Leah and Rachel; eleven sons are born; the return. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 35:23. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Ben” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: בן. 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 בן gives 52.
52
The number 52 is the Torah word בן — «son» (Genesis 3:16).
And your father hath mocked me, and changed my wages ten times; but G-d suffered him not to hurt me.
This is from the portion Vayetzei. What it is about: The dream of the ladder to heaven; Jacob with Laban: Leah and Rachel; eleven sons are born; the return.
The same number, 52, is given by these Tanakh names:
Elijah אליהו · Caleb כלב
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) — 702. A Torah word with the same number is שבת — “sabbath” (Exodus 16:23).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 7. A Torah word with the same number is או — “or” (Genesis 24:49).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 16. A Torah word with the same number is אחז — “to seize” (Genesis 22:13).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 198. A Torah word with the same number is צחק — “to laugh” (Genesis 17:17).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 2504.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 54. A Torah word with the same number is מטה — “staff, tribe” (Genesis 38:18).
The letters that come out are שט — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 309. A Torah word with the same number is שדה — “field” (Genesis 2:5).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 518. A Torah word with the same number is חריש — “plowing” (Genesis 45:6).
The number 52 appears in the classical books 97 times across 53 works. The earliest mention is ילקוט שמעוני (~1260).
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 — 52. 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. בן has 2 letters: ב Bet, ן final Nun. The first letter is Bet, the last is final Nun.
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 בן appears in the Torah as a word 324 times. The first time is Genesis 4:25. Another 59 times 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 בן these are ב and נ. The Pentateuch has 9 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 35:23:
בני לאה בכור יעקב ראובן ושמעון ולוי ויהודה ויששכר וזבולן
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.
The name בן has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 52 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.
