The name Hoshaiah in Hebrew letters is הושעיה. 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.
הושעיה
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is הושעיה. A Tanakh name: the name of two Israelites (first in Jeremiah 42:1; 3 mentions in the Tanakh). Meaning, per Strong’s dictionary (1890): “God has saved”. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 396 — the same as the Torah word מכשול, “stumbling block”. That number points to Torah page 42 of 354 — in the portion Toldot. What that portion is about: The birth of Esau and Jacob; the birthright sold for lentil stew; Isaac's wells; Jacob receives the blessing. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 10:9. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Hoshaiah” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: הושעיה. 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 הושעיה gives 396.
396
The number 396 is the Torah word מכשול — «stumbling block» (Leviticus 19:14).
And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham; and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.
This is from the portion Toldot. What it is about: The birth of Esau and Jacob; the birthright sold for lentil stew; Isaac's wells; Jacob receives the blessing.
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) — 396. A Torah word with the same number is מכשול — “stumbling block” (Leviticus 19:14).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 27. A Torah word with the same number is בכה — “to weep” (Genesis 21:16).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 63. A Torah word with the same number is חנה — “to encamp” (Genesis 26:17).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1526.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 95086.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1495.
The letters that come out are צפבזמצ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 309. A Torah word with the same number is שדה — “field” (Genesis 2:5).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 534. A Torah word with the same number is דלקת — “inflammation, fever” (Deuteronomy 28:22).
The number 396 appears in the classical books 6 times across 5 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 — 396. 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. הושעיה has 6 letters: ה He, ו Vav, ש Shin, ע Ayin, י Yod, ה He. The first letter is He, the last is He.
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 הושעיה 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 הושעיה these are ה and ה. The Pentateuch has 26 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 10:9:
הוא היה גבר ציד לפני ה׳ על כן יאמר כנמרד גבור ציד לפני ה׳
This is from the portion Noach. What it is about: The flood and the ark; the rainbow as a sign of the covenant; the tower of Babel; ten generations from Noah to Abraham.
The name הושעיה has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 396 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.
