Bluewing,
The problem of how to interpret The Bible is one which fascinates me, and there are many competing theories. One theory is that The Bible is a textbook (or how-to manual) sent from God. This seems to be the dominant theory, with a literal interpretation. This theory, however, cannot be true, since The Bible contradicts itself more than once, even on such concrete matters as how many people were in a particular place and time. Whatever it is, The Bible is not inerrent, and God does not write a textbook with mistakes in it. Therefore, the textbook (or how-to manual) theory is incorrect.
It seems to me that The Bible was written by people, and even with divine inspiration people are fallible. It also strikes me as important when The Bible was written, particularly the Old Testament. For one thing, as recently noted in another thread, the first books of the Old Testament are implicitly polytheistic. One God was to be worshipped above every other, which seems to imply that other Gods exist and they can be worshipped. The book of Exodus (I think) even claims that the God of the Hebrews is powerful enough to overcome the Egyptian Gods, another suggestion of polytheism.
Why would this be? I do not think that this causes any difficulties when we presume that people wrote The Bible, and would therefore write into it errors--including their own mistaken interpretation of what was occurring. For example, perhaps the Gods of the Egyptians did not exist, but only the God of the Hebrews. The writer, however, whose theories and expectations of the universe were shaped by the time and place where he lived, may have believed that the Egyptian Gods existed. Therefore, what we read is his mistaken interpretation of the facts, not the actual events which unfolded. Much of the same kind of reasoning may account for the difference between the God of the Old Testament and the New.
Although I do not actually believe any of them, these ideas interest me, and tend to encourage in me more tolerence toward those who believe, what on the surface, often seems quite silly to me.