The name Joktan in Hebrew letters is יקטן. 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.
יקטן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is יקטן. A Tanakh name: an Arabian patriarch (first in Genesis 10:25; 6 mentions in the Tanakh). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 169 — the same as the Torah word יקטן, “Joktan, son of Eber”. That number points to Torah page 169 of 354 — in the portion Vayikra. What that portion is about: “And He called”: the burnt, grain, peace, sin and guilt offerings — the order of the sacrifices. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 1:3. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Joktan” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: יקטן. 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 יקטן gives 169.
169
The number 169 is the Torah word יקטן — «Joktan, son of Eber» (Genesis 10:25).
And the priest shall put of the blood upon the horns of the altar of sweet incense before HaShem, which is in the tent of meeting; and all the remaining blood of the bullock shall he pour out at the base of the altar of burnt-offering, which is at the door of the tent of meeting.
This is from the portion Vayikra. What it is about: “And He called”: the burnt, grain, peace, sin and guilt offerings — the order of the sacrifices.
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) — 819. A Torah word with the same number is היתדת — “the pegs” (Exodus 38:20).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 16. A Torah word with the same number is אחז — “to seize” (Genesis 22:13).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 52. A Torah word with the same number is בן — “son” (Genesis 3:16).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 890.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 12681.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 408. A Torah word with the same number is זאת — “this” (Genesis 2:23).
The letters that come out are מדנט — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 103. A Torah word with the same number is מנחה — “offering, gift” (Genesis 4:3).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 731. A Torah word with the same number is לשאת — “to bear, support” (Genesis 36:7).
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 — 169. 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. יקטן has 4 letters: י Yod, ק Qof, ט Tet, ן final Nun. The first letter is Yod, 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 יקטן appears in the Torah as a word 2 times. The first time is Genesis 10:25. Another 1 time it stands with prefixes — “and”, “in”, “the”.
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 יקטן these are י and נ. The Pentateuch has 4 such verses. The first of them is Exodus 1:3:
יששכר זבולן ובנימן
This is from the portion Shemot. What it is about: Slavery in Egypt; Moses in the basket on the Nile; the burning bush and the Name; the first audience with Pharaoh.
The name יקטן has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 169 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.
