Like all Western languages, Hebrew is alive, racy, constantly changing and developing. Its spoken form is close enough to its less esoteric written styles for mutual intelligibility and interpenetration. But, unlike Western languages, the reading of early Hebrew texts is not restricted to academic scholarship; on the contrary, the Bible, written 3,200-2,200 years ago, the Mishnah and Midrashim of the first millennium c.E., medieval poetry and medieval...