There are no answers in Genesis

[Anomalocaris]

There's another reason why memorable, open-ended symbols are preferable to conceptual explanations. That is, in some areas, keeping the symbol active and multivalent is better than converting it into a simple moral message, as in an Aesop's fable.

This was worked out in detail in the Byzantine church during the iconoclasm controversies, but it's relevant to all kinds of religious writing and non-scientific literature.

It's related to the long-standing tradition of apophatic theology, mostly used in the Eastern Church but known in the West as well. The idea is that any concept we can use to describe God will be at best misleading, and quite possibly wrong. So for example if we assert that "God exists," the apophatic theologian will dispute this, saying that the word "exists," as understood by people, doesn't apply to God. If we say that tables exist and politicians exist and distant planets exist, we have a good idea of what the word "exists" means, but since God does not exist in the same way as those things, it's misleading to use the word.

Likewise when someone says "God is good." We have a fairly clear idea of what "good" means, and if we tried hard we could draw a circle and put in it the name of all the good things, and exclude from the circle all the bad things. But this doesn't work for God, who, being infinite, can't be excluded from any circle. Nor can he be limited to what our definition of "good" is, since the human mind is finite and God isn't. The human mind understands by dividing this from that, good from bad, but God being One has no divisions.

So in nearly every case, a conceptual description of God will be unacceptable.

This is why an open-ended symbol or image is better. When we engage with such a character -- even a fictional one -- it isn't reducible to a single coded meaning. (Again, this is why rich symbolism is not the same as allegory, which has one-to-one references.) A character like Job, for example, is to be engaged with almost like a real personality. He is not reducible to a single conceptual meaning. He behaves in ways we might not expect or approve of. He has an open-endedness that takes him beyond mere conceptual reference and more toward the way we engage with a living character.

This is why the iconodules finally won their debate with the iconoclasts. It was felt that pictures, rather than explanatory sentences, were less likely to be misleading and more likely to be something we can engage with in the proper open-ended way. Your icon of Mary can be engaged with almost as an individual person. You can love it, hate it, be confused by it, be frustrated by it, still value it, just as we do with our friends.

Similarly, in the 9th century, Kobo Daishi brought esoteric Buddhism from China to Japan. When people complained that the esoteric sutras were too hard and the cosmology and epistemology of the sect were beyond them, he said that one grasps more of the religion by looking at the paintings than by reading the sutras. Not because the paintings are comic-strip-like explanations of the doctrines, but because they prompt meditation on aspects of religion that are not to be exhausted, grasped, and then considered finished with.

So when the characters of the Bible are NOT reduced to allegorical, Aesop-like moral exemplars, they are fulfilling their purpose more effectively. They remain in the memory as open-ended, suggestive individuals. This is what keeps them alive and relevant.

Their purpose of filling out the sales collateral of an overreaching, hucksterish, and when they can get away with it, murderous cult.