More Thoughts on the Language of the Hebrew Bible

One of the problems with assuming the current texts of the Hebrew Old Testament were originally written in Hebrew during the traditional time periods to which they are ascribed is the homogeneity of language found in those texts from Genesis to Malachi. These texts are supposed to represent a time span of writing of around a thousand years.
     Consider the language change English has undergone in the last thousand years. Thousand year old English is known as Anglo Saxon and is completely unintelligible to the modern English speaker without learning it as a foreign language. Koine and Byzantine Greek are nearly mutually unintelligible. Why would we expect anything different from a thousand years of language change between Moses and Nehemiah? It would be as if a thousand page book had its first six sections in Anglo-Saxon, eight or nine in Middle English, ten or so in Elizabethan English, and the rest in the speech of 18th century Jane Austen with a few passages written in German. Yet the language used in the Hebrew Bible is so mutually intelligible between authors (with the exception of those few passages written in Aramaic), representing pre- and post-exilic Hebrew that it is virtually identical across each book. The exclusion of the deuterocanonical books only reinforces the artificiality of the written language, because these were at least originally written in Greek and Aramaic in accord with the period in which they were written.
      This doesn't even bring in the fact that Hebrew didn't exist prior to 1000 BCE, but developed between the time of the conquest and the kingdom period of David as a variant of Canaanite. For reference, Moses lived approximately 1500 BCE and was trained to read and write in Middle Egyptian and probably the more cursive version of hieroglyphic called "Hieratic." How could he have written in a language which didn't yet exist, and wasn't trained to read and write in?
     The counterpoint will be brought up that the Hebrew scribes were meticulous in their copying of the Scriptural text, counting every letter and destroying those scrolls that contained mistakes. But this practice didn't begin until at least after the Babylonian exile, as even the Scriptures themselves record that the Torah had been lost for a time during the kingdom period when Judah had reverted to polytheistic worship and had to be rediscovered.
     This is why it's important to let go of the idea that the Hebrew text has remained exactly the same since Moses, David, and all the prophets penned them. The internal linguistic evidence just isn't there. What we have, at least in some large sections, has to be, at the very least, translations and attempts at modernizing the text at some point before 1 CE when Hebrew was still a true colloquial language.
     All this being said, this does not make the Hebrew Scriptures worthless by any means. Those translations and possible edits were made to try and preserve the text, the Law, the Writings, and the Prophets for the people of Israel so they could read and understand where they came from, and what the heart of God was all about. They were just as necessary as New Testament translation and commentary is necessary today for the person not acquainted with the ancient tongue, history, and culture. But we have to be careful to keep these things in perspective and not get to the point where we lift the text of Scripture so high that, like the snake on the pole, we begin to worship it rather than the One who breathed it.