Language, Materiality and God's Hands

It is well known that scholars of ancient Jewish hermeneutics (Midrash and Talmud) subscribe to the theory that Jewish reading, conceptions of language, representation, and "the very meaning of meaning itself," were radically different than their "Greek" counterparts (Platonists and the Philonic Jewish tradition). Way back in 1982, Susan Handelman wrote,

"Indeed, the Greek term term for word, onoma, is synonymous with name. By contrast, its Hebrew counterpart -davar- means not only word but also thing. It was precisely the original unity of word and thing, speech and thought, discourse and truth that the Greek Enlightenment disrupted."

This is by no means the only work to put the radical divergence of Hebraic from Hellenic in these terms. But where did this scholarly cultural meme begin? And is there more out there than meets the eye? If this is a matter of competing ontologies as Handelman would have it, is it only language in Rabbinic culture that is really real?

I recall that in my late teens, as I became more fervently religious and engaged in more rigorous text study in Yeshiva, a contemporary took me aside and said, "remember S., they're just words." Of course it didn't occur to me at the time how laden with meaning and history this phrase was, nor was I aware of the vast philosophical discourses that surrounded it.

Had I known of Handelman's work at the time (The Slayers of Moses), I might have responded, "no my friend you don't understand, for my tradition does not know from this Western understanding of language and reality; 'For the Rabbis... the primary reality was linguistic; true being was a God who speaks and creates texts, and imatatio deus was not silent suffering, but speaking and interpreting.'"

Yes, compelling... but consider this Rashi:

ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו - בדפוס העשוי לו, שהכל נברא במאמר והוא נברא בידים, שנאמר (תהלים קלט ה) ותשת עלי כפכה, נעשה בחותם כמטבע העשויה על ידי רושם שקורין קוי"ן בלע"ז [מטבע] וכן הוא אומר (איוב לח יד) תתהפך כחומר חותם

"... everything was created with an utterance and he was created with the hands."

Adam, the pinnacle of creation, was not created by speech, but by hand out of coarse material.