Languages are, to a grand and invisible extent, ways of knowing. Or, at the very least, they become these in the direct experience of humans exposed to them. In general, they shape the mind and thought to their likeness, and act as lenses which emphasize or inhibit certain aspects of relation, meaning, identity, and correlation. All of this is and must usually remain invisible to the monolinguistic individual. There are exceptions.

In any case, ancient languages, as ways of knowing, are radically different from our modern languages, in part because they were meant to encode ‘additional domains of meaning’, and some of these were almost impossibly sophisticated. Effectively, these languages (Hebrew and Arabic are both excellent examples), in their original contexts, invited the intelligence of its hosts into highly specialized adaptations that, in many cases, make a purely ‘abstractive’ language like English appear inconceivably primitive… or even abusive… in comparison.