People always ask: "If the Bible is metaphorical, what part is metaphor and what part is literal, and how are we supposed to know the difference?" How about this history is metaphor and the teaching is literal?
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That's a problem because the Bible contains actual history, and many parts are intended to be taken to be about real things that really happened.
The issue of how to properly exegete a text involves engaging the text, and asking questions about the tex: What kind of text is it? When was it written? For whom was it written? Why was it written? Etc.
"It's all figurative" or "it's all literal" or "it's half this, half that" don't work.
The Bible by its very nature isn't a book, but a collection of books. The word "bible" comes from the Latin biblia ("books") and is borrowed from the Greek βιβλία ("books"), so by saying "the Bible" we are saying "the books". The Bible is a library of books. And like a library one can find many different kinds of books. Also helpful is that, traditionally, the books of the Bible have been ordered in certain ways that can help us categorize the sorts of books they are (it's not strict, but can be helpful).
There are basically two ways the books of what Christians call the Old Testament have been ordered. The one Christians are familiar with which follows the order of the Septuagint, and the one which Jews use in the Tanakh.
The Tanakh is ordered in three sections:
Torah - The Law
Nevi'im - The Prophets
Ketuvim - The Writings
The Septuagint is ordered in four broad categories:
The Law (or Pentateuch)
History
Wisdom Literature
The Prophets
This can be helpful, for example, when reading Genesis because we can understand that it is Torah, instruction. So how do we engage with, say, the first chapter of Genesis? How was it intended to be read? Is it supposed to be read through the lens of a modern Westerner as a divinely inspired account of material origins? Perhaps instead it should be read against the backdrop of the ancient near east, and that it provides valuable insight into what makes God and the world in Hebrew theology distinct from what other ancient near eastern cultures were saying about their gods. A good contrast is the Enuma Elish.
That's how we engage the texts. By looking at them critically, making sense of their literary context, by making sense of when and where they were written, the occasion, for what reason, and for whom were they written?
Too often people take the idea of divine inspiration to mean the Bible is somehow magical, that it's a tome that just seemingly "poofed" into existence, or was lifted down on clouds; and so often attempts to treat the Bible as though it were wholly monolithic, and very often make the mistake in thinking that the Bible is, ultimately, about us; and the point of the Bible is to make us more wise, or more spiritual, or more moral. A trope I heard growing up was frequently that Bible is an acronym for "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" which may be a cute thing to say to children, but is fundamentally false in its premise.
The Bible is a collection of many books, received through tradition, embraced and read within Christian gatherings of worship to be read out loud. The question of what should be read as part of Christian worship was a fundamental one in the evolution of the Biblical Canon in antiquity and the early middle ages. The chief purpose of the Bible, in the Christian religion, is that it bears witness to Jesus; for Christians the Bible, if it is to be treated as a book at all, is to be treated as a book about Jesus, the book that points us to Jesus. The Bible, in that sense, isn't self referential, it points out from itself to Jesus Christ. That is its purpose within two thousand years of Christian liturgy and tradition. And critically part of that has been engaging the biblical texts, to read them rightly (that is, to exegete them), so that we can hear them for all they're worth.
-CryptoLutheran
