The name Matan in Hebrew letters is מתן. 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.
מתן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is מתן. A Tanakh name: a priest of Baal and an Israelite (first in 2 Kings 11:18; 3 mentions in the Tanakh). Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 490 — the same as the Torah word תמים, “blameless, whole”. That number points to Torah page 136 of 354 — in the portion Terumah. What that portion is about: The offering for the Sanctuary; the Ark, the table and the lampstand; the Tabernacle and its curtains; the altar. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Numbers 1:3. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Matan” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: מתן. 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 מתן gives 490.
490
The number 490 is the Torah word תמים — «blameless, whole» (Genesis 6:9).
And thou shalt make forty sockets of silver under the twenty boards: two sockets under one board for its two tenons, and two sockets under another board for its two tenons;
This is from the portion Terumah. What it is about: The offering for the Sanctuary; the Ark, the table and the lampstand; the Tabernacle and its curtains; the altar.
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) — 1140.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 13. A Torah word with the same number is אחד — “one” (Genesis 1:5).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 49. A Torah word with the same number is מואב — “Moab, son of Lot” (Genesis 19:37).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1835.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 164100.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 970.
The letters that come out are יאט — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 20. A Torah word with the same number is היה — “to be, become” (Genesis 1:2).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 592. A Torah word with the same number is לסבלתיכם — “to your burdens” (Exodus 5:4).
The number 490 appears in the classical books 5 times across 5 works. The earliest mention is ספר חסידים (~1200).
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 — 490. 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. מתן has 3 letters: מ Mem, ת Tav, ן final Nun. The first letter is Mem, 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 מתן does not stand as a separate word in the Torah, but appears 1 time with prefixes — first in Genesis 34:12.
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 מתן these are מ and נ. The Pentateuch has 4 such verses. The first of them is Numbers 1:3:
מבן עשרים שנה ומעלה כל יצא צבא בישראל תפקדו אתם לצבאתם אתה ואהרן
This is from the portion Bamidbar. What it is about: The census in the desert: 603,550 men; the order of the camps around the Tabernacle; the Levites and their service.
The name מתן has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 490 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.
