The name Isaac in Hebrew letters is יצחק. 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.
יצחק
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is יצחק. From the root “to laugh”: Sarah laughed when she heard the promise of a son (Genesis 18:12; 21:6). Isaac is the second patriarch, son of Abraham and Sarah. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 208 — the same as the Torah word יצחק, “Isaac, son of Abraham”. That number points to Torah page 208 of 354 — in the portion Emor. What that portion is about: Laws of the priests; animals without blemish; the calendar of festivals — from the Sabbath to Sukkot; the lamp and the showbread. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is 2 Kings 12:6. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Isaac” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: יצחק. 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 יצחק gives 208.
208
The number 208 is the Torah word יצחק — «Isaac, son of Abraham» (Genesis 17:19).
Howbeit on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruits of the land, ye shall keep the feast of HaShem seven days; on the first day shall be a solemn rest, and on the eighth day shall be a solemn rest.
This is from the portion Emor. What it is about: Laws of the priests; animals without blemish; the calendar of festivals — from the Sabbath to Sukkot; the lamp and the showbread.
The same number, 208, is given by these Tanakh names:
Pinchas פינחס · Hagar הגר
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) — 208. A Torah word with the same number is יצחק — “Isaac, son of Abraham” (Genesis 17:19).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 19. A Torah word with the same number is גוי — “nation” (Genesis 10:5).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 55. A Torah word with the same number is הלך — “to go, walk” (Genesis 2:14).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1181.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 18264.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 426. A Torah word with the same number is תוך — “midst, middle” (Genesis 1:6).
The letters that come out are מהסד — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 109. A Torah word with the same number is צידה — “provisions, game” (Genesis 27:3).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 728. A Torah word with the same number is תשכח — “you forget” (Deuteronomy 4:9).
The number 208 appears in the classical books 49 times across 20 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 — 208. 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. יצחק has 4 letters: י Yod, צ Tsadi, ח Chet, ק Qof. The first letter is Yod, the last is Qof.
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 יצחק appears in the Torah as a word 74 times. The first time is Genesis 17:17. Another 26 times it stands with prefixes — “and”, “in”, “the”.
The verse of your name
The Pentateuch has no verse that begins with י and ends with ק. The custom allows the whole Tanakh — the Prophets and the Writings have 8 such verses. The first of them is 2 Kings 12:6:
יקחו להם הכהנים איש מאת מכרו והם יחזקו את בדק הבית לכל אשר ימצא שם בדק
«Howbeit on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruits of the land, ye shall keep the feast of HaShem seven days; on the first day shall be a solemn rest, and on the eighth day shall be a solemn rest.»
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.
