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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42637
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

These are _songs_, and we learn songs differently from spoken language. Have you ever found yourself singing along to a favorite song in a language you don't even speak, but you've listened to the recording enough to have memorized it? You were almost certainly helped by _meter_ and perhaps _rhyme_, by the way.

All of this can be true for your kids. No, they don't know the songs from attending synagogue, but they might well have heard them anyway (especially _Mi Chamocha_). Maybe Grandma likes to sing or Dad has records (remember those?) he used to play a lot or they were around friends practicing for _bar mitzvah_. They can have been _exposed_ without actually _knowing_ the songs -- and that can be enough to "click" when they hear the ancient Hebrews singing them.

Consider a slight tweak to your universal translator: you hear your primary language _until_ you start to gain some familiarity with the other, and then at that point you hear the other language while still knowing what it says in your head. Your universal translator can thus be something of a teaching tool, which could play a role in the kids retaining the other languages when they get home.

Your writing challenge, then, is to show that these songs are in fact different from other Canaanite songs they might hear in their adventures. Have your characters react to what they're hearing -- mention Grandma or Dad's records or Ben's _bar mitzvah_ or that scene in _Prince of Egypt_ at the theatre or whatever. Show the characters making a connection to the text in its original language, and you can justify them singing _that_ song in that language even if 95% of what they hear is English.

Original score: 15