The Hebrew alphabet, by its inherent inefficiency and ambiguity, initiates a culture in which the written text takes on a life and freedom of its own. Reading becomes inseparable from questioning and interpretation. No wonder those host cultures dedicated to clarity and a dominion of sense based on clear hierarchies of authority find the presence of Hebrew so insufferable, and the Hebrew sensibility subversive, viral, plague-like, threatening, paranoia-inducing (that is, inducing the knowledge or mind [noia] of the one who stands to your side, your secret sharer [para]).
And yet, the two cultures, Western and Hebrew, have cohabited, intermingled, and stood in fertile and open dialogue with each other for centuries. It is not hard to find shared sensibilities between them. The conduit, the hyphen, the cultural corpus callosum, is the concept of literature, held in suspense between the two cultures like an image registering on two different hemispheres of the same brain.
Literature is the term reserved for texts that are so rich in meaning that they may move to opacity. Reading even ordinary Hebrew is more akin to parsing dense and elusive poetry, like Donne's or Dickinson's, than reading a well-written instruction manual or set of commands.
When Eric Havelock claims in his monumentally influential work, The Origins of Western Literacy, that Hebrew is incapable of producing literature, he is right, if for the wrong reasons. There is no literature in Hebrew ... not because all expression is reduced to robotic and thoughtless mimicry, but because all reading is already literary as we Westerners, neo-Greeks, have come to understand it, because all reading already invites a hypertrophic play with letters to induce hidden meanings. Thus Hebrew gives rise to grand traditions of letterature: Talmud, kabbalah, gematria (numerology rendered more intense by the fact that Hebrew letters are also numbers), and a science of word play as a genuine source of knowledge.
Without access to a clear channel of transmission, it is hard to develop a concept of objective reporting, that is, writing which reports the observed truth about an object faithfully or, one might say, slavishly. There can be no ideal of clarity, if the very channel of communication is untrustworthy. And without a concept of objective reporting, it is difficult to develop the accomplice concept of fiction, writing that constructs the truth (from fictio, to make) rather than transmitting a prior truth that already exists and is then observed and reported. Thus, there is no word for fiction in Hebrew. When the Greeks supplied the missing vowels, they transformed the Hebrew alphabet into a nearly-perfected instrument of command and control. With the vowel, the alphabet could become more like code.
Blame the vowels for the computer.