It’s important to address a common criticism: that some analysis of “the Word” of the various religious texts is too literal and that it’s not taking into account the underlying metaphorical or allegorical messages that are present in the text. That’s a problematic criticism for a number of reasons:

• There are many people who take the texts to be the literal truth. You don’t have to look far (e.g. the Answers in Genesis crowd) to find people who believe that everything in their religious texts represents the literal word of the omniscient creator of the universe. They go to great lengths to find ways to try and explain all parts of the text that they believe to be literal.
• Every religious person believes at least some part of the texts to be literal, so where do the (supposed) metaphors start and stop? Keep in mind that there is always someone further out on the spectrum than yourself when it comes to a belief in such things. Remember that the analysis on this site isn’t written only for you.
• Why should the words of the omniscient creator of the universe need to be interpreted via devices such as metaphors? If you were a god leaving text for your creation, would you open up your message to interpretation via the use of metaphors and allegory?
• There is a case to be made that the earlier texts (at the very least) were not metaphorical and that the authors really did believe everything that they were writing. Well, perhaps “believe” is too strong a word; instead, they did write the most believable alternative (to them) for what they didn’t understand. The fact that they got so much wrong shouldn’t now be excused with the claim that it was simply metaphorical. Just because they had to make things up to fill gaps in their knowledge does not now give people the right to excuse their ignorance by saying it was metaphorical.
• Keep in mind when the texts were written. The pentateuch was written in about 500 BCE and depicts events from about 4,000 BCE to 1,500 BCE. It’s not trivial to judge how metaphorical something was via the mind and standards of someone in the 21st century. The texts must be considered via the abilities and knowledge of people living 2,500 years before us. For us, the thought of the world being held up by pillars or there being water above an invisible dome is ridiculous, however for (some) people in 500 BCE those were the best “scientific” explanations for the natural phenomenon that they observed. To us, the “pillars of the Earth” can be taken as a metaphor, however go back 2,500 years and the “pillars of the Earth” was a real explanation to a physical problem (for people of the time).
• Religious texts are primarily about control. They were intended as being tools of direct control over the people around at the time of writing, and today they are still used via dissection and excuses (such as being “metaphorical”) to control and manipulate people. That attempt at continual control needs to be addressed at a fundamental, literal level.
• The “metaphorical” gap is continually widening as we discover more and more. A couple of hundred years ago almost all people read the texts literally, however today it isn’t reasonable to do that (e.g. the nonsense of a global flood or a man existing in the stomach of a fish for three days). Does it make sense that the words of an omniscient creator of the universe have to be incrementally excused via the widening goalposts of metaphors? How much more extensive will the metaphors have to be in the years to come to accommodate the advances that science will make?
• To take an early example of the problems faced by the it’s-a-metaphor approach, it could be argued that the creation of “adam” was a metaphor for the creation of lots of men or for the creation of everyone, however if that’s the case, then why did the text go on to say that the man named adam had a child at age 130 and lived to be 930 years old? That specificity can’t be metaphorical and therefore it doesn’t make sense to assume that the character involved was intended to be a metaphor. Having a look around at nearby text is not a favorite game of the metaphor believers.