Daily Talk
The Rambam teaches the length of the solar year down to a seventy sixth of a part of an hour, closes a nineteen year cycle with no remainder at all, and then says the true equinox falls about two days before anything he has just calculated. Why build an instrument that carefully and then tell us where it fails?
Two Days Ahead of the Sun
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About This Talk
Chapter 10 of Kiddush HaChodesh sets out the second opinion about the length of the solar year, three hundred sixty five days, five hours, nine hundred ninety seven parts and forty eight moments, and shows that on this figure the nineteen year cycle closes with no remainder at all. It gives the length of a season, the anchor at the first spring of creation, and a procedure any reader with a pen can use to find the equinox of any year. Then the Rambam rules, in his own name and with the words it appears to me, that the Sages relied on this reckoning when the High Court instituted leap years, and closes by conceding that both reckonings rest on the sun's mean progress and that the actual equinox falls about two days earlier than either.