The name Beryl in Hebrew letters is בריל. 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.
בריל
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is בריל. An English name taken from beryl, a clear precious stone; the word comes from Greek beryllos. It came into use as a girls' name in England at the end of the 19th century. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 242 — the same as the Torah word אראלי, “Areli, son of Gad”. That number points to Torah page 242 of 354 — in the portion Behaalotcha. What that portion is about: Lighting the lampstand; the second Passover; the cloud leads the camp; quail and complaints; Miriam and tzaraat. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 49:27. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Beryl” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: בריל. 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 בריל gives 242.
242
The number 242 is the Torah word אראלי — «Areli, son of Gad» (Genesis 46:16).
And HaShem said unto Moses: 'Gather unto Me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people, and officers over them; and bring them unto the tent of meeting, that they may stand there with thee.
This is from the portion Behaalotcha. What it is about: Lighting the lampstand; the second Passover; the cloud leads the camp; quail and complaints; Miriam and tzaraat.
The same number, 242, is given by these Tanakh names:
Zachary זכריה · Ariel אריאל
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) — 242. A Torah word with the same number is אראלי — “Areli, son of Gad” (Genesis 46:16).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 8. A Torah word with the same number is אהב — “to love” (Genesis 22:2).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 44. A Torah word with the same number is ילד — “to bear, give birth” (Genesis 3:16).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 958.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 41004.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 658. A Torah word with the same number is בתנור — “in the oven” (Leviticus 7:9).
The letters that come out are שגמכ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 363. A Torah word with the same number is החשן — “the breastpiece” (Exodus 28:22).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1016.
The number 242 appears in the classical books 6 times across 5 works. The earliest mention is עץ חיים (~1573).
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 — 242. 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. בריל has 4 letters: ב Bet, ר Resh, י Yod, ל Lamed. The first letter is Bet, 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 בריל 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 בריל these are ב and ל. The Pentateuch has 5 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 49:27:
בנימין זאב יטרף בבקר יאכל עד ולערב יחלק שלל
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.
«And HaShem said unto Moses: 'Gather unto Me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people, and officers over them; and bring them unto the tent of meeting, that they may stand there with thee.»
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.
