The name Sylvester in Hebrew letters is סילבסטר. 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.
סילבסטר
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is סילבסטר. Sylvester is an English name for boys that comes from Latin: the word “silva” means “forest”. Today this name is found mostly in the United States. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 371 — the same as the Torah word שמאל, “left, left side”. That number points to Torah page 17 of 354 — in the portion Noach. What that portion 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 verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Psalms 111:8. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Sylvester” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: סילבסטר. 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 סילבסטר gives 371.
371
The number 371 is the Torah word שמאל — «left, left side» (Genesis 13:9).
And Nahor lived after he begot Terah a hundred and nineteen years, and begot sons and daughters.
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.
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) — 371. A Torah word with the same number is שמאל — “left, left side” (Genesis 13:9).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 29. A Torah word with the same number is דכה — “crushed” (Deuteronomy 23:2).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 83. A Torah word with the same number is חלילה — “far be it” (Genesis 18:25).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1513.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 48285.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 1036. A Torah word with the same number is כריתות — “divorce” (Deuteronomy 24:1).
The letters that come out are חמכשחנג — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 429. A Torah word with the same number is משפט — “judgment, justice” (Genesis 18:19).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1675.
The number 371 appears in the classical books 4 times across 4 works. The earliest mention is שער הפסוקים (~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 — 371. 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. סילבסטר has 7 letters: ס Samekh, י Yod, ל Lamed, ב Bet, ס Samekh, ט Tet, ר Resh. The first letter is Samekh, the last is Resh.
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 סילבסטר 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 ס and ends with ר. The custom allows the whole Tanakh — the Prophets and the Writings have 2 such verses. The first of them is Psalms 111:8:
Any name written in Hebrew letters is a number: סילבסטר = 371. And every date has a number of its own. There is a day in the year when the two coincide.
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.
