The name Onisim in Hebrew letters is אוניסים. 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.
אוניסים
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is אוניסים. The name comes from Greek “onesimos”, which means “useful” or “helpful”. A man called Onesimus is mentioned in a letter of the apostle Paul. This form of the name is used in Russia. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 177 — the same as the Torah word בקעה, “valley, plain”. That number points to Torah page 177 of 354 — in the portion Tzav. What that portion is about: The fire on the altar is never to go out; the priests' portion; the seven days of consecration of Aaron and his sons. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 2:4. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Onisim” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: אוניסים. 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 אוניסים gives 177.
177
The number 177 is the Torah word בקעה — «valley, plain» (Genesis 11:2).
And when it was slain, Moses took the blood, and put it upon the horns of the altar round about with his finger, and purified the altar, and poured out the remaining blood at the base of the altar, and sanctified it, to make atonement for it.
This is from the portion Tzav. What it is about: The fire on the altar is never to go out; the priests' portion; the seven days of consecration of Aaron and his sons.
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) — 737. A Torah word with the same number is לקראתו — “to meet him” (Genesis 14:17).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 24. A Torah word with the same number is חוי — “Hivite” (Genesis 10:17).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 69. A Torah word with the same number is אביון — “poor, needy” (Exodus 23:6).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 727. A Torah word with the same number is ואשתך — “and your wife” (Genesis 6:18).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 7937.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 573. A Torah word with the same number is בראשיכם — “as your heads” (Deuteronomy 1:13).
The letters that come out are תפטמחמי — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 587. A Torah word with the same number is מצאתנו — “has befallen us” (Numbers 20:14).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 469. A Torah word with the same number is אבתינו — “our fathers” (Genesis 46:34).
The number 177 appears in the classical books 1 time across 1 work. The earliest mention is מעשה רוקח על המשנה (~1740).
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 — 177. 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. אוניסים has 7 letters: א Alef, ו Vav, נ Nun, י Yod, ס Samekh, י Yod, ם final Mem. The first letter is Alef, 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 אוניסים 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 אוניסים these are א and מ. The Pentateuch has 83 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 2:4:
אלה תולדות השמים והארץ בהבראם ביום עשות ה׳ אלהים ארץ ושמים
This is from the portion Bereshit. What it is about: Creation in six days and the Sabbath; Adam and Eve in the garden; Cain and Abel; ten generations to Noah.
Any name written in Hebrew letters is a number: אוניסים = 177. And every date has a number of its own. There is a day in the year when the two coincide.
«And when it was slain, Moses took the blood, and put it upon the horns of the altar round about with his finger, and purified the altar, and poured out the remaining blood at the base of the altar, and sanctified it, to make atonement for it.»
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.
