«[...] pues non se asemejaba a las onomatopeyas escritas más habituales, todas ellas fiadas a la aspiración de la consonante»¹.

"[...] for it was nothing like the customary (written) onomatopoeias, all of which rely on the aspiration of the consonant"².

"Descriptive and most obvious meaning of the word, of a writing, of a text"; this is how Dante defined "letter" seven hundred years ago.
  This synthetic, ancient definition tells us a lot about literality, maybe much more than the thousands of pages written on the subject since. But we had better start from the beginning. Among scholars, in the past for the most part, the word³ "literality" has been (and continues to be) widely used. Also in this case it is necessary to decide whether it is a precisely definable word and if, consequently, it can be employed in a scientific debate.
  Dante suggests, first of all that "letter" is the "most obvious" meaning of a word. "Obviousness" is a very context-dependent quality, also depending on the individual utilizing it. A question can be called "obvious" whenever the person responding believes that the answer is clear, elementary, delivered with certainty and without any difficulty. But "obvious" questions are asked, sometimes, meaning that, for the person asking, they are not obvious at all.
  The literal meaning will then be obvious for some, less clear for others - here arises an initial problem.
  Another reason why the word "literal" is not very reliable is found in what Dante says soon after: "of the word, of a writing, of a text". In all these cases, some interpretation can be "literal", but the meanings of a word, of a passage of writing, of a whole text may not fully coincide with one another. By contrast, often the most obvious meaning of a word is the one least obvious within its co-text. A text is not made of Lego bricks, its components cannot be considered immutable, it not possible to disassemble it, or put it away separating its pieces according to form and color and then reconstruct it. The pieces of that huge building game that natural language is have completely different characteristics: they have no finite form, texture, color, or aspect. Natural language is anisomorphic.
  The debate on literality, or rather, the polemic use of the adjective "literal", is not new. There were cases of denigrating accusations of literality used to accuse cultures outside one's own (measuring with parameters of "righteousness") of materialism.
  In early Christianity, there were polemics about the "correct" interpretation of the Bible. The Hellenist school looked with suspicion at the Hebraic interpretation of the Bible, considered too literal, attributing this literalism to the inability of Jewish interpreters to view the Scriptures from a spiritual dimension. The Jews, according to the Hellenistic representation, were too materialist, were too keen on the "bodily" meaning of the Biblical text. By contrast, Hellenists prefer an allegorical interpretation. In such a view, if the Scriptures contain elements that are too base or crude, it is obvious (here we are again with the key concept of literality!) that they are there not to be literally interpreted (what is sacred cannot be base, material), but with an allegorical key.
  By "allegory", we remind the reader, we mean a rhetorical figure according to which a word refers to a deeper and hidden sense. The Greek etymology of the word lends to the sense of "speaking in another way". In the Hellenistic period, therefore, there was an implicit dichotomy literalism/allegory, and literality was defined ex contrario as non-allegorical meaning.
  The fact that a different degree of literalism existed between the two schools, of Alexandria and Antioch, was not presented and is yet another argument. It is comprised within the framework of the perception of the foreign as worse. This takes us back to the lexical dichotomy of the terms Hebrew/Jewish, made necessary by the need to confound things and mark differences between the origin of the Bible, necessarily Hebraic, and its belonging to a people, renamed "Jewish", in an attempt to discredit them to the highest possible degree, associating them by this name, not to the Bible, but to the character, Judah, traitor of Jesus, and their modern exegetes, incapable to rising above mere literalism of the sacred text because they were incapable of spirituality.
  The fact that a different degree of literalism existed between the two schools, of Alexandria and Antioch, was not presented and is yet another argument. It is comprised within the framework of the perception of the foreign as worse. This takes us back to the lexical dichotomy of the terms Hebrew/Jewish, made necessary by the need to confound things and mark differences between the origin of the Bible, necessarily Hebraic, and its belonging to a people, renamed "Jewish", in an attempt to discredit them to the highest possible degree, associating them by this name, not to the Bible, but to the character, Judah, traitor of Jesus, and their modern exegetes, incapable to rising above mere literalism of the sacred text because they were incapable of spirituality.
  In this discriminatory light, the historical interpretation of Biblical events is considered the most literal and deplorable. History is of humans, not divine, a fact that "Jews" evidently did not consider well enough.
  But not even these polemics based on cultural differences that are so roughly cleaved, can one get have a coherent view of literalism, because one learns that the Hebraic school predicated non-literal interpretation of the Scriptures as well. It was rather a different kind of literalism.
  The main difference with respect to the Hellenist methods for interpretation used in the Midrash, "the non-literal method of the rabbis"⁴, lies in the fact that the rabbis generally considered single isolated fragments, not whole texts. In this perspective, the sense of supposed Jewish literalism lies in the fact that, instead of being based on the notion of "text" they based themselves on the notion of "writing", to use Dante's expression. Neither. in this case, can one talk of "word". Let us look at some examples:
  In Exodus 17.8 it is written: Then came Amalek". According to Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eleazar Hisma, the verse must be interpreted in an allegorical sense: when the Jews separated from the Torah, the enemy came upon them⁵. Not a literal interpretation, as you can clearly see.
  In Exodus 17.9, it is written: "Tomorrow I will stand upon the top of the hill" but, according to Rabbi Eleazar, the top (rosh) indicates the deeds of the fathers and the hill the deeds of the mothers.
  Maybe the only form of greater literality in Hebrew exegesis compared to the Hellenistic lies in the fact that sometimes the former tends to emphasize the importance of the single letter or word, while the latter doesn't: it would have been very difficult for them to have done otherwise, though, since Hellenistic criticism had to do with Biblical texts translated into Greek.

Bibliographical references

LONGXI Z. Cultural differences and Cultural Constructs: Reflections on Jewish and Chinese Literalism, in Poetics Today, 19:2, Tel Aviv, the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Summer 1998, p. 305-328.

MARÍAS J. Negra espalda del tiempo, Punto de lectura, 2000 (original edition 1998), ISBN 84-663-0007-7.

MARÍAS J. Dark Back of Time, New York, New Directions, 2001 (translated by Esther Allen), ISBN 0-8112-1466-4.

WOLFSON H. A. The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. 1, Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Harvard University Press, 1956.