The name Isidore in Hebrew letters is איזידור. 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.
איזידור
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is איזידור. Isidore is the French and English form of the Greek name Isidoros, which means “gift of Isis”, an Egyptian goddess. Isidore of Seville was a great scholar of Spain around the year 600. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 238 — the same as the Torah word רחל, “Rachel, wife of Jacob”. That number points to Torah page 238 of 354 — in the portion Behaalotcha. What that portion is about: Lighting the lampstand; the second Passover; the cloud leads the camp; quail and complaints; Miriam and tzaraat. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 23:15. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Isidore” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: איזידור. 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 איזידור gives 238.
238
The number 238 is the Torah word רחל — «Rachel, wife of Jacob» (Genesis 29:6).
But there were certain men, who were unclean by the dead body of a man, so that they could not keep the passover on that day; and they came before Moses and before Aaron on that day.
This is from the portion Behaalotcha. What it is about: Lighting the lampstand; the second Passover; the cloud leads the camp; quail and complaints; Miriam and tzaraat.
The same number, 238, is given by these Tanakh names:
Rachel רחל
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) — 238. A Torah word with the same number is רחל — “Rachel, wife of Jacob” (Genesis 29:6).
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) — 965.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 40302.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 366. A Torah word with the same number is חשבון — “Heshbon, city of Sihon” (Numbers 21:25).
The letters that come out are תמעמקפג — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 733. A Torah word with the same number is בארצתם — “in their lands” (Genesis 10:5).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1174.
The number 238 appears in the classical books 20 times across 9 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 — 238. 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. איזידור has 7 letters: א Alef, י Yod, ז Zayin, י Yod, ד Dalet, ו Vav, ר Resh. The first letter is Alef, the last is Resh.
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 איזידור 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 איזידור these are א and ר. The Pentateuch has 15 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 23:15:
אדני שמעני ארץ ארבע מאת שקל כסף ביני ובינך מה הוא ואת מתך קבר
This is from the portion Chayei Sarah. What it is about: Sarah's death and the purchase of the cave of Machpelah; the servant seeks a wife for Isaac; Rebecca at the well; Abraham's death.
Any name written in Hebrew letters is a number: איזידור = 238. And every date has a number of its own. There is a day in the year when the two coincide.
«But there were certain men, who were unclean by the dead body of a man, so that they could not keep the passover on that day; and they came before Moses and before Aaron on that day.»
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.
