The name Ferdinando in Hebrew letters is פרדיננדו. 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.
פרדיננדו
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is פרדיננדו. The name Ferdinando comes from Old Germanic fardi + nand, “journey and brave”. It is the Italian form of Ferdinand. Ferdinando I de' Medici was grand duke of Tuscany from 1587 to 1609. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 404 — the same as the Torah word קדש, “holiness, holy thing”. That number points to Torah page 50 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 Exodus 34:15. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Ferdinando” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: פרדיננדו. 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 פרדיננדו gives 404.
404
The number 404 is the Torah word קדש — «holiness, holy thing» (Exodus 3:5).
And Jacob came from the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said: 'Thou must come in unto me; for I have surely hired thee with my son's mandrakes.' And he lay with her that night.
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) — 404. A Torah word with the same number is קדש — “holiness, holy thing” (Exodus 3:5).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 35. A Torah word with the same number is גבל — “to set bounds” (Exodus 19:12).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 89. A Torah word with the same number is טף — “little children” (Genesis 34:29).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1686.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 51568.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 2478.
The letters that come out are וגקמטטקפ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 347. A Torah word with the same number is מזרק — “sprinkling bowl” (Exodus 27:3).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1703.
The number 404 appears in the classical books 3 times across 3 works. The earliest mention is שער הפסוקים (~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 — 404. 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. פרדיננדו has 8 letters: פ Pe, ר Resh, ד Dalet, י Yod, נ Nun, נ Nun, ד Dalet, ו Vav. The first letter is Pe, the last is Vav.
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 פרדיננדו 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 פרדיננדו these are פ and ו. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Exodus 34:15:
פן תכרת ברית ליושב הארץ וזנו אחרי אלהיהם וזבחו לאלהיהם וקרא לך ואכלת מזבחו
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 פרדיננדו has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 404 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.
