RJS at Jesus Creed reminds us that studying the Bible as literature is an attempt to fully understand what it says, not an attempt to prove that some parts of it are false.
When we look at Genesis 1-11 there is no sifting and searching for bits and pieces of truth amidst “error,” interpretation, or myth – we take the whole as given. But reading the text literally with literary intelligence sees forms of truth-telling that are different in genre, form, and purpose. We misunderstand scripture when we look for correspondence between modern science and the cosmology of the Ancient Near East. We misunderstand the nature of scripture when we equate ANE cosmology with error. We also misread Genesis if we don’t recognize that the form of historical truth-telling in Genesis 1-11 is different from the historical truth-telling in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. The historical truth-telling in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles is, in turn, different from the form of historical truth-telling we expect in historical monograph today.