The name Ishtvan in Hebrew letters is אישטבן. 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.
אישטבן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אישטבן. István is the Hungarian form of Stephen, from the Greek word “stephanos”, which means “crown, wreath”. Stephen I, crowned around the year 1000, was the first king of Hungary. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 372 — the same as the Torah word שבע, “seven”. That number points to Torah page 18 of 354 — in the portion Lech Lecha. What that portion is about: “Go forth”: Abraham leaves Haran; the promise of land and offspring; the covenant between the pieces; circumcision. 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 “Ishtvan” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: אישטבן. 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 אישטבן gives 372.
372
The number 372 is the Torah word שבע — «seven» (Genesis 4:24).
And there was a famine in the land; and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was sore in the land.
This is from the portion Lech Lecha. What it is about: “Go forth”: Abraham leaves Haran; the promise of land and offspring; the covenant between the pieces; circumcision.
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) — 1022.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 21. A Torah word with the same number is אך — “only, surely” (Genesis 7:23).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 57. A Torah word with the same number is מזבח — “altar” (Genesis 8:20).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1394.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 92686.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1337.
The letters that come out are תמבנשט — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 801.
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1428.
The number 372 appears in the classical books 9 times across 6 works. The earliest mention is ספר קרניים (~1400).
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 — 372. 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. אישטבן has 6 letters: א Alef, י Yod, ש Shin, ט Tet, ב Bet, 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 אישטבן 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 אישטבן 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.
Any name written in Hebrew letters is a number: אישטבן = 372. And every date has a number of its own. There is a day in the year when the two coincide.
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.
