This. Take the Enuma elish as an example. Marduk uses the upper half of Tiamat’s body to create the earth, including certain distinctive landforms and features of Mesopotamia: her breasts are the mountains and her tears are the Tigris and Euphrates. But mountains and rivers are within the realm of daily experience: tears are salty but the Tigris and Euphrates are fresh; and breasts are soft but the mountains hard and rocky. Even the simplest commoner of the day could see from daily experience on the land that these things were not strictly and literally true. But there is no reason to think the people of Babylon disbelieved the story, and looked upon it as “just” fiction, despite that. Seeing how much honor the story was given and how it was preserved through history, there is every reason to think that the people embraced and believed it anyway, in some folk-sense that has evaded the western mind probably since Greco-Roman times. I think it’s similar with much of the very earliest biblical literature, such as stories that lie behind the primeval narrative (Genesis 1 - 11).