The name Charles in Hebrew letters is שארל. 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.
שארל
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is שארל. From Germanic karl, “free man”. Charlemagne, king of the Franks, made the name famous in Europe. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 531 — the same as the Torah word נתנאל, “Nethanel, chief of Issachar”. That number points to Torah page 177 of 354 — in the portion Tzav. What that portion is about: The fire on the altar is never to go out; the priests' portion; the seven days of consecration of Aaron and his sons. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 34:23. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Charles” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: שארל. 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 שארל gives 531.
531
The number 531 is the Torah word נתנאל — «Nethanel, chief of Issachar» (Numbers 1:8).
And when it was slain, Moses took the blood, and put it upon the horns of the altar round about with his finger, and purified the altar, and poured out the remaining blood at the base of the altar, and sanctified it, to make atonement for it.
This is from the portion Tzav. What it is about: The fire on the altar is never to go out; the priests' portion; the seven days of consecration of Aaron and his sons.
The same number, 531, is given by these Tanakh names:
Nathanael נתנאל
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) — 531. A Torah word with the same number is נתנאל — “Nethanel, chief of Issachar” (Numbers 1:8).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 9. A Torah word with the same number is בוא — “to come, enter” (Genesis 2:19).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 54. A Torah word with the same number is מטה — “staff, tribe” (Genesis 38:18).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1996.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 130901.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1633.
The letters that come out are בתגכ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 425. A Torah word with the same number is תכה — “to sit at the feet” (Deuteronomy 33:3).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1055.
The number 531 appears in the classical books 4 times across 4 works. The earliest mention is שיטה מקובצת על הש"ס (~1550).
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 — 531. 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. שארל has 4 letters: ש Shin, א Alef, ר Resh, ל Lamed. The first letter is Shin, 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 שארל 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 שארל these are ש and ל. The Pentateuch has 3 such verses. The first of them is Exodus 34:23:
שלש פעמים בשנה יראה כל זכורך את פני האדן ה׳ אלהי ישראל
This is from the portion Ki Tisa. What it is about: The half-shekel for the census; the golden calf and the broken tablets; the thirteen attributes of mercy; the second tablets.
The name שארל has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 531 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.
