The name Mattaniah in Hebrew letters is מתניה. 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.
מתניה
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is מתניה. A Tanakh name: the name of ten Israelites (first in 2 Kings 24:17; 16 mentions in the Tanakh). Meaning, per Strong’s dictionary (1890): “gift of God”. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 505 — the same as the Torah word שרה, “Sarah, wife of Abraham”. That number points to Torah page 151 of 354 — in the portion Ki Tisa. What that portion is about: The half-shekel for the census; the golden calf and the broken tablets; the thirteen attributes of mercy; the second tablets. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 7:8. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Mattaniah” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: מתניה. 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 מתניה gives 505.
505
The number 505 is the Torah word שרה — «Sarah, wife of Abraham» (Genesis 17:15).
And no man shall come up with thee, neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.'
This is from the portion Ki Tisa. What it is about: The half-shekel for the census; the golden calf and the broken tablets; the thirteen attributes of mercy; the second tablets.
The same number, 505, is given by these Tanakh names:
Sarah שרה
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) — 505. A Torah word with the same number is שרה — “Sarah, wife of Abraham” (Genesis 17:15).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 19. A Torah word with the same number is גוי — “nation” (Genesis 10:5).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 64. A Torah word with the same number is נטה — “to stretch out, pitch” (Genesis 12:8).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1905.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 164225.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1975.
The letters that come out are יאטמצ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 150. A Torah word with the same number is יסף — “to add” (Genesis 4:2).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 618. A Torah word with the same number is בריתו — “his covenant” (Exodus 2:24).
The number 505 appears in the classical books 5 times across 4 works. The earliest mention is פרי עץ חיים שער יום הכפורים (~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 — 505. 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. מתניה has 5 letters: מ Mem, ת Tav, נ Nun, י Yod, ה He. The first letter is Mem, the last is He.
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 מתניה 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 מתניה these are מ and ה. The Pentateuch has 16 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 7:8:
מן הבהמה הטהורה ומן הבהמה אשר איננה טהרה ומן העוף וכל אשר רמש על האדמה
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 מתניה has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 505 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.
