Can a myth be true?

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By Micah Kiel

Micah Kiel

The Bible says, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Does this mean that God is literally a man with a stick leading sheep through a scrubby hillside? The answer, obviously, is “no.” But how do we know this? Isn’t everything in the Bible literally true? We know that calling God a shepherd is a metaphor because of the kind of literature we are reading. Psalm 23 is poetry, and in poetry we would expect symbolic, metaphorical, language.
Several weeks ago I wrote an article in which I stated that Noah’s ark is a myth. Here are the reasons why we should consider the story of Noah’s ark in Genesis 6-9 to be a myth.
The first step in determining genre is understanding what kinds of literature existed in the ancient world. History, as we understand it today, was not a genre of literature that existed in the ancient world.

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