Because [the Bible is] a story, the Spirit who is its presiding author and editor is free to use all the devices available to any storyteller.... The deepest difficulty with literalism is that it fails to see the principal device the Spirit uses to weave all those elements into a single story. All that wildly various wet-wash is hung on a paradoxical clothesline of imagery, not on a string of uniform propositional truths. The Bible is held together by icons, by word-pictures like Light, Word, Water, Marriage, the Garden, the Tree, the Blood of Abel, the Paschal Lamb, the Blood on the Doorposts, the Rock in the Wilderness, the Bread from Heaven, and finally the City, both as the historical Jerusalem in the Old Testament and as the destiny of the world in the book of Revelation. It's these icons, these sacraments of the real presence of the Word himself, that make it a whole.
Robert Farrar Capon
The Fingerprints of God
Plus, for a (reasonably) lengthy essay on the way the early Fathers and later theologians looked at reading the Bible, check out Jason Byassee's essay-review "Reading with the Saints," on the art of biblical interpretation. He not only discusses the issues, but looks at several worthwhile books on the subject.
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