Are Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew the Same Language, or Two Different Ones?

A recently published book by the educator and linguist Jeremy Benstein, Hebrew Roots, Jewish Routes, is an entertaining and knowledgeable tour for English speakers of the modern Hebrew language. Despite its light tone, it raises some serious questions. One of them that recurs in the book is the relationship between what Benstein calls “Historical Religious Hebrew (HRH)” and “Contemporary Vernacular Israeli (CVI).” Are HRH and CVI, he asks, the same language or two different ones?

This question has been asked before. In fact, the Israeli linguist Ghil’ad Zuckerman, a leading proponent of the “two different languages” school of thought who is frequently mentioned by Benstein, once had me for a debating partner at a public evening dedicated to this subject.

Why do I think that Zuckerman and others like him are wrongheaded? After all, one can point to—and Zuckerman that night did point to—numerous ways in which CVI is so removed from HRH that the average CVI-speaker is unable to comprehend even a relatively simple HRH text.