The name Ellison in Hebrew letters is אליסון. 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.
אליסון
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אליסון. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 157 — the same as the Torah word זקן, “old, elder”. That number points to Torah page 157 of 354 — in the portion Vayakhel. What that portion is about: The Sabbath comes before the work on the Sanctuary; the people bring more than enough; Bezalel and the craftsmen build the Tabernacle. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 36:27. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Ellison” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: אליסון. 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 אליסון gives 157.
157
The number 157 is the Torah word זקן — «old, elder» (Genesis 18:11).
And there were eight boards, and their sockets of silver, sixteen sockets: under every board two sockets.
This is from the portion Vayakhel. What it is about: The Sabbath comes before the work on the Sanctuary; the people bring more than enough; Bezalel and the craftsmen build the Tabernacle.
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) — 807. A Torah word with the same number is תאות — “utmost bound of” (Genesis 49:26).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 22. A Torah word with the same number is יחד — “together” (Genesis 13:6).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 58. A Torah word with the same number is נח — “Noah” (Genesis 5:29).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 632. A Torah word with the same number is בכרתי — “my birthright” (Genesis 27:36).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 7137.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 438. A Torah word with the same number is תובל — “Tubal, son of Japheth” (Genesis 10:2).
The letters that come out are תכמחפט — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 557. A Torah word with the same number is ראשון — “first” (Genesis 8:13).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 443. A Torah word with the same number is ביתאל — “Bethel” (Genesis 12:8).
The number 157 appears in the classical books 11 times across 6 works. The earliest mention is בעל הטורים על התורה (~1300).
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 — 157. 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. אליסון has 6 letters: א Alef, ל Lamed, י Yod, ס Samekh, ו Vav, ן final Nun. The first letter is Alef, 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 אליסון 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 אליסון these are א and נ. The Pentateuch has 35 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 36:27:
אלה בני אצר בלהן וזעון ועקן
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 אליסון has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 157 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.
