Daily Talk
Fifty nine minutes and eight seconds. That is how far the sun moves in a day, and the Rambam builds a table out of it for ten days, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, then fixes a point in the spring of 4938 and tells you to count from there. And then, almost in passing, he tells you that if you would rather begin somewhere else you may, and that the same arithmetic runs backwards into any year you like. Why does a code of law hand you permission to move the place you count from?
The Starting Point You Are Allowed to Move
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About This Talk
Chapter 12 gives the sun's mean motion, 59 minutes and 8 seconds in a day, and builds it out into figures for ten, one hundred, one thousand and ten thousand days, for a month of 28 degrees 35 minutes and 1 second and for a regular lunar year of 348 degrees 55 minutes and 15 seconds, with the interval between one sighting of the moon and the next fixed at 29 full days, no more and no less. It then introduces the apogee, the point in an orbit furthest from the earth, which rotates about one degree in seventy years, and fixes the starting point, the eve of Thursday the third of Nisan of the year 4938, at which the sun's mean position stood at 7 degrees 3 minutes 32 seconds in Aries and its apogee at 26 degrees 45 minutes 8 seconds in Gemini. The chapter closes by working an example one hundred days out, admitting frankly that the figure may be an hour off and that the slack is taken up later in the moon's calculation, and granting the reader permission to establish a different starting point and to run the same reckoning backwards into the past.