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I would argue than no one is really competent in a language that has been dead and unused for millennia.

The entire cultural context of that society and work is gone and we have but a few shards thereof.

Martha Roth talks about one of the great benefits of working on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary being that scholars were, by necessity, exposed to a broad assortment of texts. The people who worked on the dictionary had a wide view of the entire culture that is virtually impossible to get today, especially as scholars are pressured to specialize more and more. (Roth, herself, specialized in ancient Mesopotamian law.)

Miguel Civil was probably the most famous example of this.

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