Daily Talk
A lunar month is twenty nine days, twelve hours and seven hundred ninety three parts of an hour, and no calendar in the world can hand you seven hundred ninety three parts of anything. So the Rambam throws the remainder out of every month and then spends the chapter tracking exactly where it went. Where does a system put what it cannot hold?
Where the Leftover Hours Go
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About This Talk
Chapter 8 turns the true lunar month into whole days, because Rosh Chodesh may never begin in the middle of a day. Every month is therefore set at twenty nine days or thirty, ten of the twelve are fixed permanently in advance, and the surplus the moon leaves behind is absorbed by the only two months left free, Marcheshvan and Kislev. The chapter closes with a small arithmetic that reads the shape of an entire year from nothing but the weekday of two consecutive Rosh HaShanahs, and a warning that the same count means the opposite thing in a leap year.