Good post. One of the first that introduced me to this line of thinking was Robert Alter, in his book The Art of Biblical Narrative. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the Bible, while still being faithful to its intent. Rather than treating the Bible like a history or science textbook, we read it as sacred story. He argues that the Genesis account was never meant to be read literally, as a word for word historical account of how things came to be. It isn't its historicity that makes it true, but its resonance with our experience of God and the human condition. A literalist interpretation is more a product of the Enlightenment and the rise of science (which benefited us, but also screwed us up in many ways), and Scripture has really only been read that way for a couple hundred years or so.
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Yup, each chapter of the bible is best read from the perspective of who it was written by and who was the intended audience.
We do the bible a disservice when we try to project our modern biases into its interpretation.