The name Percival in Hebrew letters is פרסיבאל. 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.
פרסיבאל
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is פרסיבאל. Percival was created by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes in the 12th century for a knight of King Arthur; it probably comes from Old French for “pierce the valley”. He searches for the Grail. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 383 — the same as the Torah word שבועה, “oath”. That number points to Torah page 29 of 354 — in the portion Vayera. What that portion is about: Three visitors at Abraham's tent; the plea for Sodom; the birth of Isaac; the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Psalms 7:3. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Percival” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: פרסיבאל. 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 פרסיבאל gives 383.
383
The number 383 is the Torah word שבועה — «oath» (Genesis 24:8).
And it came to pass on the morrow, that the first-born said unto the younger: 'Behold, I lay yesternight with my father. Let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.'
This is from the portion Vayera. What it is about: Three visitors at Abraham's tent; the plea for Sodom; the birth of Isaac; the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah.
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) — 383. A Torah word with the same number is שבועה — “oath” (Genesis 24:8).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 23.
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 77. A Torah word with the same number is עז — “she-goat” (Genesis 15:9).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1619.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 51005.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 2138.
The letters that come out are וגחמשתכ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 777. A Torah word with the same number is מתושאל — “Methushael, descendant of Cain” (Genesis 4:18).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1328.
The number 383 appears in the classical books 2 times across 2 works. The earliest mention is פרדס רמונים יב א.
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 — 383. 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. פרסיבאל has 7 letters: פ Pe, ר Resh, ס Samekh, י Yod, ב Bet, א Alef, ל Lamed. The first letter is Pe, 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 פרסיבאל 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
The Pentateuch has no verse that begins with פ and ends with ל. The custom allows the whole Tanakh — there it has exactly one, Psalms 7:3:
פן יטרף כאריה נפשי פרק ואין מציל
A verse whose whole sum equals your name
ויהי אחרי המגפה
Numbers 25:19 · 13 letters in the verse
All the letters of this verse add up to 383 — exactly your name's number. The Pentateuch has 5,853 verses, and only 200 of them fall below 1000. Of the 2,980 names in our index, 80 match this way — about one name in thirty-seven.
Any name written in Hebrew letters is a number: פרסיבאל = 383. And every date has a number of its own. There is a day in the year when the two coincide.
«And it came to pass on the morrow, that the first-born said unto the younger: 'Behold, I lay yesternight with my father. Let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.'»
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.
