On literal interpretations

What is a literal interpretation? The issue isn’t that easily decided. Take the hadith: A believer is not stung from the same hold twice. What is the literal interpretation of this? Clearly, it can’t be that a believer is literally stung from the same hole. Now, another related problem presents itself: Which interpretation comes before the other, in the sense, the literal apparently is before the figurative. When we talk of God’s hand, the first interpretation seems to be figurative, and only an outrageous and a mindless stretch of imagination would lead one to say, as many wahhabis do, that God has hands. When wahhabis say that the literal comes first, the sense of this is not clear. In that sense the hadith of “stung from the same hole” would completely lose its clear meaning.