Religion

There are plenty of Hebrew and Greek speakers. Modern Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and even English are different in many ways than ancient or older version of the same languages.

For example, people struggle to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English. It was written some time around 1400 CE. Just 600 years ago, English sounded and read like a foreign language. Go back to about 1000 CE and look at Beowulf, which was written in Old English. For almost every English speaker, it is indecipherable. Even 200 years later, Shakespeare's English and the English of the King James Version of the bible seems unfamiliar to many English speakers. Here's a page from Beowulf in the original Old English:



Now, go back a couple of millennia with Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. Even though those languages are still spoken and written today, it now takes serious scholarship to understand them well. Latin, on the other hand, has been pretty well preserved by the Roman Catholic Church, although few non-clerics speak it. Does it sound today as it did during Biblical times? Almost certainly not.