The name Elihu in Hebrew letters is אליהוא. 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.
אליהוא
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אליהוא. A Tanakh name: a friend of Job; also three Israelites (first in 1 Samuel 1:1; 11 mentions in the Tanakh). Meaning, per Strong’s dictionary (1890): “He is God”. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 53 — the same as the Torah word אבן, “stone”. That number points to Torah page 53 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 24:45. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Elihu” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: אליהוא. 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 אליהוא gives 53.
53
The number 53 is the Torah word אבן — «stone» (Genesis 2:12).
And G-d came to Laban the Aramean in a dream of the night, and said unto him: 'Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad.'
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.
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) — 53. A Torah word with the same number is אבן — “stone” (Genesis 2:12).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 17. A Torah word with the same number is טוב — “good” (Genesis 1:4).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 35. A Torah word with the same number is גבל — “to set bounds” (Exodus 19:12).
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) — 1063.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 224. A Torah word with the same number is דרך — “way, road” (Genesis 3:24).
The letters that come out are תכמצפת — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 1030.
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 334. A Torah word with the same number is כשדי — “Chaldean” (Genesis 11:28).
The number 53 appears in the classical books 4 times across 4 works. The earliest mention is מגלה עמוקות על איוב (~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 — 53. 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. אליהוא has 6 letters: א Alef, ל Lamed, י Yod, ה He, ו Vav, א Alef. The first letter is Alef, the last is Alef.
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 אליהוא 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 אליהוא these are א and א. The Pentateuch has 8 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 24:45:
אני טרם אכלה לדבר אל לבי והנה רבקה יצאת וכדה על שכמה ותרד העינה ותשאב ואמר אליה השקיני נא
This is from the portion Chayei Sarah. What it is about: Sarah's death and the purchase of the cave of Machpelah; the servant seeks a wife for Isaac; Rebecca at the well; Abraham's death.
The name אליהוא has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 53 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.
