The name Maria in Hebrew letters is מרים. 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.
מרים
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is מרים. Perhaps from “bitterness” or Egyptian “beloved.” Sister of Moses and Aaron; after the crossing of the sea she led the women in song (Exodus 15:20). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 290 — the same as the Torah word פרי, “fruit”. That number points to Torah page 290 of 354 — in the portion Masei. What that portion is about: The forty-two journeys through the desert; the borders of the land; the Levite cities and the cities of refuge. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 10:5. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Maria” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: מרים. 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 מרים gives 290.
290
The number 290 is the Torah word פרי — «fruit» (Genesis 1:11).
Moreover ye shall take no ransom for the life of a murderer, that is guilty of death; but he shall surely be put to death.
This is from the portion Masei. What it is about: The forty-two journeys through the desert; the borders of the land; the Levite cities and the cities of refuge.
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) — 850. A Torah word with the same number is תכלת — “blue wool” (Exodus 25:4).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 11. A Torah word with the same number is חג — “festival” (Exodus 10:9).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 56. A Torah word with the same number is יום — “day” (Genesis 1:5).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1140.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 43300.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 820. A Torah word with the same number is פלשתי — “Philistine” (Genesis 10:14).
The letters that come out are יגמי — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 63. A Torah word with the same number is חנה — “to encamp” (Genesis 26:17).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 690. A Torah word with the same number is ריפת — “Riphath, son of Gomer” (Genesis 10:3).
The number 290 appears in the classical books 6 times across 5 works. The earliest mention is פרי עץ חיים שער הקריאת שמע (~1573).
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 — 290. 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. מרים has 4 letters: מ Mem, ר Resh, י Yod, ם final Mem. The first letter is Mem, the last is final Mem.
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 מרים appears in the Torah as a word 12 times. The first time is Exodus 15:20. Another 9 times 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 מרים these are מ and מ. The Pentateuch has 14 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 10:5:
מאלה נפרדו איי הגוים בארצתם איש ללשנו למשפחתם בגויהם
This is from the portion Noach. What it is about: The flood and the ark; the rainbow as a sign of the covenant; the tower of Babel; ten generations from Noah to Abraham.
The name מרים has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 290 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.
