The name Soraya in Hebrew letters is סוריה. 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.
סוריה
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is סוריה. Persian form of the Arabic Thurayya, the name of the Pleiades star cluster. Soraya was the queen of Iran in the 1950s. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 281 — the same as the Torah word ערוה, “nakedness”. That number points to Torah page 281 of 354 — in the portion Matot. What that portion is about: Vows and their annulment; the war with Midian; the tribes of Reuben and Gad ask for land beyond the Jordan. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Numbers 14:19. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Soraya” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: סוריה. 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 סוריה gives 281.
281
The number 281 is the Torah word ערוה — «nakedness» (Genesis 9:22).
And the half, which was the portion of them that went out to war, was in number three hundred thousand and thirty thousand and seven thousand and five hundred sheep.
This is from the portion Matot. What it is about: Vows and their annulment; the war with Midian; the tribes of Reuben and Gad ask for land beyond the Jordan.
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) — 281. A Torah word with the same number is ערוה — “nakedness” (Genesis 9:22).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 20. A Torah word with the same number is היה — “to be, become” (Genesis 1:2).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 56. A Torah word with the same number is יום — “day” (Genesis 1:5).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1141.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 43761.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 949.
The letters that come out are חפגמצ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 221. A Torah word with the same number is ארך — “length” (Genesis 6:15).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 668. A Torah word with the same number is מרכבתו — “his chariot” (Genesis 46:29).
The number 281 appears in the classical books 5 times across 3 works. The earliest mention is עץ חיים (~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 — 281. 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. סוריה has 5 letters: ס Samekh, ו Vav, ר Resh, י Yod, ה He. The first letter is Samekh, 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 סוריה 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 סוריה these are ס and ה. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Numbers 14:19:
סלח נא לעון העם הזה כגדל חסדך וכאשר נשאתה לעם הזה ממצרים ועד הנה
This is from the portion Shlach. What it is about: The twelve spies; forty years for forty days; challah and tzitzit.
The name סוריה has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 281 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.
