Neville, “If I’m not mistaken, you brought up the case of Hashem’s hand elsewhere. The pashut pshat is that he has a literal hand”
I repeatedly said that everything has to be read within context, including the Chumash. You cannot take one word and one verse out of context and run with it. Therefore, when it says that Yaacov expired, was embalmed and was buried but it doesn’t say that he died but later in the parshah it does say that he died, you look at the entire parshah in context, including with meforshim, and you can learn what the Torah means to say only when everything is in context. What this means was that Yaacov’s dying was exceptional and the state he is in now is exceptional, but it does not mean specifically that he’s physically alive.
The same is with Hashem’s hand. If we know Chumash (and Nach) we know know that Hashem is not a physical Being and therefore we know that Hashem’s hand, and yes, He does have a hand, is not a physical thing, it’s a higher concept that we can’t understand.
You think that pushat pshat means that posukim are automatically teiched to mean “physical aspects/physical things” which is not the case. Only when we know the entire context, only then can we understand if the pashut pshat is spiritual or physical or even higher than spiritual when it comes to Hashem because He created the spiritual so the dimension He occupies is even higher than the spiritual.