The name Reuben in Hebrew letters is ראובן. 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.
ראובן
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is ראובן. “See, a son!” (Genesis 29:32). Jacob and Leah’s firstborn. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 259 — the same as the Torah word ראובן, “Reuben, son of Jacob”. That number points to Torah page 259 of 354 — in the portion Chukat. What that portion is about: The red heifer; Miriam's death; water from the rock and the striking with the staff; Aaron's death; the bronze serpent. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is 2 Kings 10:29. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Reuben” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: ראובן. 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 ראובן gives 259.
259
The number 259 is the Torah word ראובן — «Reuben, son of Jacob» (Genesis 29:32).
And Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly unto the door of the tent of meeting, and fell upon their faces; and the glory of HaShem appeared unto them.
This is from the portion Chukat. What it is about: The red heifer; Miriam's death; water from the rock and the striking with the staff; Aaron's death; the bronze serpent.
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) — 909.
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 16. A Torah word with the same number is אחז — “to seize” (Genesis 22:13).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 43. A Torah word with the same number is גם — “also” (Genesis 3:6).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1015.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 42541.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1076.
The letters that come out are גתפשט — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 792. A Torah word with the same number is תשבץ — “checkered work” (Exodus 28:4).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1151.
The number 259 appears in the classical books 8 times across 6 works. The earliest mention is בעל הטורים על התורה (~1300).
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 — 259. 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. ראובן has 5 letters: ר Resh, א Alef, ו Vav, ב Bet, ן final Nun. The first letter is Resh, 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 ראובן appears in the Torah as a word 37 times. The first time is التكوين 29:32. Another 2 times it stands with prefixes — “and”, “in”, “the”.
The verse of your name
The Pentateuch has no verse that begins with ר and ends with נ. The custom allows the whole Tanakh — the Prophets and the Writings have 8 such verses. The first of them is 2 Kings 10:29:
רק חטאי ירבעם בן נבט אשר החטיא את ישראל לא סר יהוא מאחריהם עגלי הזהב אשר בית אל ואשר בדן
The name ראובן has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 259 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.
