When we read the OT stories, we need to keep in mind that the audience expectations and cultural conventions for making sense of the story were different then our own. Modern Western culture is fixated on facts and information and accuracy. ANE culture was not. Often narratives were framed as recapitulations of familiar stories or characters. Meaning and significance were found in fitting the characters and events into a specific “true” or meaningful plot line and the tellers had creative license to make that work. The point was to teach true things about God and people, not necessarily to accurately document historical fact.
So with Noah, you have a recapitulation of the creation story. God repents of all he has made and seeks to unmake and remake it. “In the beginning” in Genesis there is a watery chaos from which God brings forth dry land, vegetation, and animal life, and the animals and humans are sent out with a blessing to multiply and to fill the earth. The flood story repeats this motif. The flood story itself is recapitulated in the story of the cross. Like Noah, Jesus warns people of the coming judgment and calls people to repentance. Just as God provided the ark as a means of grace and redemption to save Noah and his family, God provides the cross to rescue everyone who turns to Christ for salvation. Just as the world was recreated after the Flood, Jesus’s resurrection ushers in the era of New Creation to be culminated in the Eschaton. You could even say that the dove being the symbol of hope and promise is recapitulated in the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus “like a dove,” and then later being the promised seal of the New Covenant of salvation.
It helped me a lot to start reading the Bible as literature with a lot of intertextuality going on, not just as a bunch of facts to be proven to give credibility to its divine authorship.The Bible Project videos are great for helping you tune into the literary aspects and structural nuances that you miss when you are used to reading it as something else.