In Ruth Kartun-Blum’s book, Profane Scriptures, she explores the relationship between Classical Hebrew and Modern Israeli Hebrew, and how strongly today’s spoken and written Hebrew relies on the linguistic structure of Classical Hebrew in a way no other language does. Because Hebrew survived almost solely in written form until the mid-1900s, evolution has not affected Hebrew as much as most other languages— to a speaker of modern English, for example, Old English (5th century CE) is entirely incomprehensible, but to a speaker of modern Hebrew, Classical Hebrew (10th-6th century BCE) is entirely comprehensible, if somewhat archaic. It’s easier for a speaker of modern Hebrew to read a 3,000-year-old Biblical text than it is for some of us to read a 400-year-old Shakespearean play, which begs the question: how does modern Hebrew, existing in a very secular space, reconcile the fact that the bulk of its existence comes from the heart of three of the world’s major religions?