Christian tradition has actually always understood the Imago Dei as figurative and referring to intellectual capacities rather than physical likeness. It's a common theme throughout Patristics, due to the Platonic influence, but you can even see it in the New Testament notion that Christ is the image of the invisible God--that can't be a physical resemblance, because an invisible God wouldn't have a physical appearance at all.
The Hebrew context is trickier, and I know less about it, but there's a long tradition there with treating the language itself in a fairly symbolic fashion (think of Kabbalah). The most obvious example is the name of God, YHVH, which might not have an etymological link to the word "to be" (HYH), but it's common to see the similarity as meaningful. I've also seen the local rabbi derive theological meaning from other features of Hebrew, so I think highly figurative interpretations might actually be more appropriate than highly literal ones when dealing with Hebrew Scripture.