The name Laurel in Hebrew letters is לורל. 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.
לורל
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is לורל. The name Laurel comes from English: its root, the word laurel, means “laurel tree”. It is a girl's name that is found mostly in the United States. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 266 — the same as the Torah word סור, “to turn aside”. That number points to Torah page 266 of 354 — in the portion Balak. What that portion is about: Balak hires Balaam; the donkey sees the angel; blessing instead of curse: “how goodly are your tents, O Jacob”. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Leviticus 11:47. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Laurel” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: לורל. 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 לורל gives 266.
266
The number 266 is the Torah word סור — «to turn aside» (Genesis 8:13).
And he answered and said: 'Must I not take heed to speak that which HaShem putteth in my mouth?'
This is from the portion Balak. What it is about: Balak hires Balaam; the donkey sees the angel; blessing instead of curse: “how goodly are your tents, O Jacob”.
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) — 266. A Torah word with the same number is סור — “to turn aside” (Genesis 8:13).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 14. A Torah word with the same number is יד — “hand” (Genesis 3:22).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 50. A Torah word with the same number is כל — “all, every” (Genesis 1:21).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1026.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 41836.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 568. A Torah word with the same number is במצולת — “into the depths” (Exodus 15:5).
The letters that come out are כפגכ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 123.
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 670. A Torah word with the same number is עתר — “to entreat” (Genesis 25:21).
The number 266 appears in the classical books 1 time across 1 work. 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 — 266. 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. לורל has 4 letters: ל Lamed, ו Vav, ר Resh, ל Lamed. The first letter is Lamed, the last is Lamed.
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 לורל 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 לורל these are ל and ל. The Pentateuch has 9 such verses. The first of them is Leviticus 11:47:
להבדיל בין הטמא ובין הטהר ובין החיה הנאכלת ובין החיה אשר לא תאכל
This is from the portion Shmini. What it is about: The eighth day: Aaron's first service; fire from heaven; the death of Nadab and Abihu; clean and unclean animals.
The name לורל has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 266 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.
