You need to understand the history of mythology and religion and its philosophy to be able to comprehend what's given to us through the bible.
Learn of Friedrich Schelling.
If you're reading the bible in a strict and literal way, you're doing it wrong.
Try this: put yourself in the shoes of a man with nowhere near the knowledge we have, or, and maybe more accurately, a different kind of knowledge than we have - one that's more focused and refined. These men didn't have all of the things we have to weigh them down, so their scope, while also being rather narrow in comparison, dealt much less with the wide variety we find around here, as they were likely more focused on farming, smithing, carpentry, etc.
If you can't even just begin with those kinds of thoughts, you're never going to be able to understand much of the messages of the bible.
I'll give you another clue: the languages of old carried different properties than the types of languages we use now. While some of the more popular languages that are in use today are quite old, plenty of the most popular are derived from languages of old, sure, but they're much more bogged down.
Let's take Latin, for instance: do a little research and see the word efficiency (how much information can be translated by using how many words) for Latin compared to what we're using here - English.
Latin may have been a true memetic language, but Hebrew may be one of the oldest. These things matter.