The Metaphor of Talion

Literary theories have accustomed us to welcome the opaqueness of the sign. Poetic discourse, which for modern sensibility has become the focal point of the very question of language, emblematically maintains the "absolutely pure" ambiguity of its symbols and the autonomy of its signifying forms (Barthes 1987:71). Essentially untranslatable, the poetic text resists¹ the menace of interpretation that attempts to track it down like quarry. It eludes our nets, to re-emerge as an untiring enigma.

The Bible in the Jewish tradition is, conversely, a source of religious legislation, a code that governs human existence in all its details. It therefore calls for a univocal reading in order to guarantee uniform conduct. In this sense, it is thought to partake in the values of signification that semiotics has taught us to assign to the domain of prose and everyday language: readability, trans-parence, referentiality. This "transitive language is the one which seeks to transform reality immediately, not to double it: 'practical' utterances linked to acts, to techniques, to behavior, invocatory utterances linked to rites, since rites too are presumed to open nature" (Barthes 1972: 268; emphasis added). At the same time, the Bible is also a Text, a sacred and prophetic utterance. As such, it assumes the parameters of a literary work, thus operating in an evasive, sibylline, and infinitely plural way. This ambivalence justifies one's wondering about the status of the Bible in traditional Jewish exegesis, a unique source of inspirati praxis now Revelation, divided between the literality of daily life and poetic literariness.²

That which has come to be known as the talion law, along with its two-thousand-year-old trail of passions and misconceptions, may serve as a touchstone for this analysis, inasmuch as it can serve as a focus for the question of the letter in the polemical context that can highlight the stakes involved ³:

If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

(Exodus 21:22-25)

The Hebrew exegetic tradition has been held by the West to be a hermeneutic of the letter. This view is based on the rhetorical and classical sense of literariness, which leads us away from poetic intransitivity and to the impoverishing univocality of prose: "the literal sense is that which holds to words taken by the letter, to words understood according to their usage in ordinary language: consequently, it is that which presents itself immediately to the minds of those who speak the language" (Fontanier 1968: 57; translation J.S.). Here Fontanier confounds the literal sense of a word with its immediate legibility. According to this logic, the "Pharisee" literality clings strictly to a narrow primary meaning, which "kills" both the openness of language and the freedom of thought: an implicit osmosis necessarily sets in between the hermeneutic practice and its governing ideology, and the quarrel of language, where the "literal" and the "figurative" lock horns, echoes a more general opposition between two types of societies and two different attitudes towards the juridical system and penal codes.

"Eye for eye, tooth for tooth": this verse is understood as a declaration of principle whose rigor encapsulates both the tautness of the letter and the inexorability of the law. Literal interpretation, such as is attributed to the Hebrew tradition of reading, would draw a parity equation that plays on both the meanings of the words and objects in the world; it postulates an equivalence of the signifier and the signified (the word "eye" signifies one's eye) and an equivalence of eyes that allows one to substitute the eye of the culprit for that of the victim. Unreceptive to allegory, the Pharisee who takes the text "at the letter" can be...