Find your name in the Torah

A curiosity about letters: we look for your name, or the words of your question, hidden in the Hebrew text of the Torah by reading letters at equal skips, like the famous "Bible code". Below we explain what it is and what it isn't.

Your first name works best: long names almost never show up.
Do you know how to write your name in Hebrew?

What the Torah is

The Torah is the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. It is the sacred text of Judaism and is also part of the Christian Old Testament. It is written in Hebrew, with 22 letters and no vowels, and it has been copied with enormous care for many centuries. Here we use the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript that survives (from the year 1008).

What the "code" is

In 1994, three Israeli researchers (Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg) published a paper in the journal Statistical Science claiming they had found the names of famous rabbis hidden in Genesis, by reading letters at equal skips, for example one every 7 letters or one every 50. In 1997, journalist Michael Drosnin made it famous with his book "The Bible Code" and claimed the text hid prophecies.

In 1999, another team of mathematicians (McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai) showed in the same journal that those results depended on how the data had been chosen, and they found similar "messages" in other long books, such as War and Peace and Moby Dick. Today it is considered a statistical coincidence, not a hidden message.

Why your name shows up

The Torah has 304,850 letters. If we try every possible skip, forward and backward, there is a huge number of combinations, and almost any short word shows up many times by chance. That's why we also tell you how many times your name appears: it's the best proof that this is a game with letters.

With respect. For millions of people the Torah is a sacred text. Here we don't interpret it, we don't discuss its religious message and we don't use it to predict anything: we only play with the shape of its letters, as a curiosity. If this text is sacred to you and you'd rather not do this, we understand.

Hebrew text: Westminster Leningrad Codex (public domain), in the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible edition (CC BY 4.0 license). For the search, vowels and accents are removed and final letter forms count as regular ones. Converting your name into Hebrew letters is approximate. English verse: World English Bible (public domain).