Knowing a language's history can help me learn the language in not just understanding and recalling the newly learnt language but also gain deeper insight into similarly clustered languages with the same family. It is similar in ways such as knowing the roots to a word to aid in conferencing the word's definition. A language history's may connect the dots similar to what Dr. Atlansin in the NY Times article said "and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages". Languages sometimes gives information on history instead of the other way around. An example was in the article that "Romanian and other Romance languages, for instance, started to diverge from Latin after A.D. 270, when Roman troops pulled back from the Roman province of Dacia. Applying those dates to a few branches in its tree, the computer was able to estimate dates for all the rest."
Knowing that modern Hebrew has history from Biblical Hebrew is what aided the revival of hebrew. Imagine how a religious group recreate the language of their tribe thousands of years ago and re-adopt it as a mother language - of course it won't be perfect but it is after rediscovering the language after not speaking it for 2000 years. The Bible was obviously written in a very different world from today which means that some Biblical Hebrew are used today to represent a different thing, but a thing that performs the same function.
Biblical Hebrew is usually pronounced with Modern Hebrew pronunciation, so lots of people aren't aware of how Biblical Hebrew used to be pronounced. It had a lot of sounds that are only present in Arabic. They cannot be found in Modern Hebrew because modern hebrew was first revived by Europeans speaking Yiddish. This goes to point how difficult to accurate revive a language after thousands of years especially if aiming for accuracy.
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