The Bible is the direct word of God. Or it's not. We don't really know, do we?
Yes, people of faith have faith that it is. But even they have to agree that the words themselves, even if divinely inspired, were not exactly committed to paper (or stone) by God. For though He is omnipotent, omniscient, and possibly omnipresent, He apparently has poor handwriting. Which means that these words we've loved and studied and lived by for thousands of years were inscribed by the hands of men. Human men. Which should immediately make the project a little suspect in the literalness department.
After all, such men as these who long ago bothered to take the time and effort to record the words for posterity without the benefit of word processing and tape recorders are the same type of men who enjoy telling stories. I've met a few of them in my day, and the one thing I can say for sure about such men is that they cannot be trusted to take dictation. Their natural instinct is to add a little twist here and there -- you know, tweak the narrative to make it sexier, more violent, more preachy; more anything, actually, as long as it ends up more interesting and therefore memorable.
Hey, you think your favorite joke was born intact out of the womb? Long before you first heard it, that masterpiece of setup and surprise had been told and retold hundreds of times by people who'd each change a little detail on the fly in order to get a bigger laugh, eventually resulting in the joke you love. And where did they get that inclination to edit and create? From God, of course, in whose image we're all made. So it's not such a stretch to imagine Him looking over the shoulder of His scribes as they played a biblical game of Telephone, compressing a little history or exaggerating the facts, and thinking to Himself, Hmmm, that's not quite the way I meant it, but it's pretty good.
If indeed the Almighty, blessed be He, intended us to retell these stories throughout eternity, He would've wanted them to be as strong as possible. Otherwise, as His beloved Darwin pointed out, they wouldn't stand a chance of surviving. Which means that when the legend becomes fact, you gotta go with the National Enquirer's version. So saith the Lord. And if He didn't, He should have.