> And a modern Hebrew speaker can easily understand Biblical Hebrew — they're closer than even Modern English and Shakespearean.
Of course, because modern Hebrew was constructed based on (the modern understanding of) Biblical Hebrew around the 1920s or slightly earlier, whereas Modern English naturally evolved for ~400 years from Shakespearean English and other forms of English.
That’s simply incorrect. Most of the innovations in Modern Hebrew (relative to Biblical Hebrew) came in the Mishnaic period, early CE. Hebrew continued to be used as a liturgical language, and occasionally a business language, both in its Biblical and Mishnaic forms, until the 1880s (not 1920s), when the Zionist movement brought it back into use for casual speech. The Hebrew used in the Mishnah is quite close to the modern written language, though it lacks modern words and some very recent innovations like topic-first sentences.
Modern Hebrew is built on Biblical Hebrew, on Mishnaic Hebrew, on Medieval Hebrew, on Yiddish, and has influence from many other languages. However, there is nothing similar to how English and other native languages evolved. Between the 2nd or 3rd centuries CE and the 20th century, there were no native monolingual speakers of Hebrew - even Mishnaic Hebrew was used only as a second language; while Medieval Hebrew was a lingua franca that Jewish populations speaking other languages would use for communication, not a native language to any of them.
Also, while the creation of Modern Hebrew began around the 1880s, it was an extremely niche phenomenon until much later - at least according to Wikipedia, in 1900 there were fewer than 10 families even in Ottoman Palestine speaking Modern Hebrew currently.
Of course, because modern Hebrew was constructed based on (the modern understanding of) Biblical Hebrew around the 1920s or slightly earlier, whereas Modern English naturally evolved for ~400 years from Shakespearean English and other forms of English.