Why do Jewish holidays change their date

Question

Let’s say rosh Hashanah. It varies it’s date every year, but if the Jewish calendar is a fixed amount of days, wouldn’t it be earlier and earlier or later and later every year?

In: 4

Answer 1

The Hebrew calendar is based on the lunar cycle instead of the solar cycle. So instead of the normal year having 365 days the Hebrew calendar have about 354 years with leap months added to make up the difference. This means that each month starts with a new moon. You can see remnence of this in the Cristian holidays related to Easter. In the Hebrew calendar the Cristian Easter selebration takes place on the same day every year.