Yes you are. I think sometimes I am just a simpleton who wants yes and no answers to things. I am pretty methodical, and I don’t just accept things because others do. I look for the evidence and unless/until I see it as a preponderance of evidence, I won’t jump.

So it is with this issue. I first of all don’t see a REASON to embrace an either/or position regarding the literalness versus mythological question. Personally, I don’t see many reasons to believe that the stories cannot have happened as related, AS WELL AS being metaphorical and allegorical. That is, I cannot see why the stories did not happen as related and that we can find the deeper meaning behind the actual events! Why must they be proven to have not happened as related? Is there some reason to beleive otherwise? Is it an issue about wanting to relegate everything to the natural and explainable? Is there no room for miraculous things to have happened, through God’s hand working in the affaris of men, and for God to have worked them out as He did to teach us lessons?
Isn’t Hebrews plain in explaining that the events of Israel and the old covenant were shadows intended to point to the realities?
So again, I just wanted to know where you were coming from on this so that I could understand, maybe, where you are headed! My mind isn’t closed on this, it just doesn’t compute that I have to decide that some things have to have been non-literal for them to also have a spiritual lesson to learn.
That’s the simpleton in me!

I’m a little confused by this question because the way I’m reading it, it seems to be asking something I’ve made myself clear about (and about which you and I have interacted before). They did not all literally happen (we determine this by genre identification, historical studies, and the like), even when the authors might have thought they did; some stories were not historiographical and were certainly intended by their authors to teach other lessons that are still meaningful to us.

Genesis 1 (above), while probably bearing the meaning I described in the post, is certainly not also possible to have “actually happened” based on a multitude of reasons; this is not (as you fear it might be) determined by some blind “either literal or metaphorical” rule, but on a reasoned analysis. Before we had comparative literary or scientific data to help guide us in interpreting Genesis 1, we could have recognized its meaning and maintained agnosticism about its historicity.

Whether something like the story of Jonah whose enduring meaning lies outside of historicity could have also happened is not a particularly interesting question to me, especially when it’s wholly unverifiable. If the Jonah story were to be (somehow) definitively disproved as an historical account, it wouldn’t matter to me at all. Here again, we make judgments about stories based on their literary character and extrabiblial sources of information corroborating or problematizing them.

Am I approaching the intent of your question?

Maybe you missed my question in m last comment. I would like to know your thoughts on it please:

“What is your opinion about the events of the bible. Did they all literally happen, or are they just mythological stories intended to teach us other lessons?”

I agree completely with your anlysis of these sometimes difficult passages. But I would like to know your view about the LITERAL establishment of these events.

Do you feel, for example, that the earth was created in seven days (whether 7 long periods or 7 24-hour days) or whether this was just a literary device to point out, maybe, the significance of the number 7?

This question has been bugging me for a while now, because although I used to be a literalist, I have read many posts like yours in which authors interpret the events of the bible in STRICT metaphorical terms. Meaning, in many cases, that there is no room for the event to have ACTUALLY happened (regardless of whether or not there are metaphorical underpinnings)

This bothers me because I see no problem with an event of the bible to have BOTH a foundation in reality AND a metaphorical meaning. Yet, I read many commentaries that seek to negate the actual happening and explain it away as pure allegory or metaphor. Can’t it be BOTH? What is your opinion about the events of the bible. Did they all literally happen, or are they just mythological stories intended to teach us other lessons?