Hebrew & Aramaic is probably comparable to Church Latin & the vernacular languages in the Middle Ages. Spoken by the scribes and priesthood and kept as a type of guild secret to preserve its purity (charitable view) or to maintain power (cynical view).
The history in England of getting from the imposed and restricted Latin-language Bible to the predecessors of the King James Bible shows the absolute mania of the Church hierarchy to maintain a dependent populace and that might have been similar to Israel then. Lots of martyrs to the cause of allowing the individual to know the WORD.
The actual history of English bibles is a bit more nuanced than you think. There were numerous partial English translations long before the reformation (which suggest that the Church didn't object to the idea of scripture in English per se).
Moreover, each of the protestant English translations also included various marginalia criticizing the authority of Rome, for example by calling the Pope "the Antichrist" (Geneva Bible). That the Church hierarchy reacted negatively to this is no more surprising that King James himself's condemnation when the same bible criticized the divine right of kings, declaring it “very partial, untrue, seditious, and savoring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits.”
We'd probably agree that the reaction of authority to criticism in the 16th and 17th Centuries was not pretty and often unjust, but that's a very different story from the simple claim that the Church objected to the very idea of translating the Bible into English.
Vulgate = Vulgar = Common.