Should we take scripture literally wherever possible? Example Genesis 1-3. A scripture that was an oral tradition, written by Moses much later. The idea that God created the universe and the world in six days. Or the authors intents were not to explain the science of reality?
Should we always interpret scripture literally, or wherever possible? Is that wise?
It depends on what you mean by interpreting the Bible literally, as in should we consider the Bible to be an accurate historical account of what really happened, or when Jesus said that he was a door, should we consider him to literally be a door with hinges? The Bible clearly uses figurative language and using a wooden literal approach will lead to misunderstanding it.
The authors of the Bible were much more concerned with parallelism than with chronological accuracy because the important truth that wanted to communicate was not the order that events happened, for example, there are a number of instances where two stories are placed next to each other that are not in chronological order because they have parallel elements that the author wants to draw our attention to, but that does not mean that those things did not historically happen
A chiasm is where the Bible expresses a sequence of thoughts and then expresses the same sequence of thoughts in the reverse order, such as saying that the first will be last and the last will be first. Likewise, the story of Noah's Flood is one big chasm, and in Hebrew manuscripts it is one big paragraph, which is easiest to see by the sequence of numbers and then the reverse of that sequence. Chiasms allow the author to give commentary by placing the emphasis on its center (God remembered Noah), plus it helps us to understand the parallel thoughts. Likewise, there are elements in the days of creations that appear in the same order in the account of Noah's flood, such as in genesis 1:2, we have darkness, chaos, and water, which aptly describes a flood, then there is a spirit hovering over the water, then there is water above and water below, and so forth, so it is clearly making the point that it is a re-creation event. Yes, it is historically accurate that a lot of people drowned, but that is not the important thing that the author wants us to know. The events in the Bible took place over thousands of years, so its authors could have told us about any number of events, but there is intention in which events they chose to tell us about and the order in which they chose to tell us, such as with the disaster of Noah's flood of too much water mirroring Joseph's famine, which is a disaster of too little water, but these evens did historically happen.
The Hebrew in the creation account is numbering cycles of chaos and order, not 24-hour cycles, but rather the words that we use to describe 24-hour cycles of evening and morning are derived from the cycles of chaos and order. In other words, when it is evening things are becoming less distinct and when it is morning things are becoming more distinct, so God is making things distinct when He separates light from darkness or the waters below from the waters above, and calling the light day is calling it distinct, not a 24-hour period.
