Steiner on the Bible as Inspired Literature

I've been wrestling with the question regarding to what extent we ought to read the Bible "as any other book." I just got access to George Steiner's review of Alter and Kermode's Literary Guide to the Bible. His basic critique is that the recent trend evident in The Guide reduces the Bible to mere literature without accounting for its otherness. I love this quote in reference to the book of Job:

"I can--just--come to imagine for myself that a man of more or less my own biological and social composition could have written "Hamlet" or "Lear" and gone home to lunch and found a normal answer to the question "How did it go today?" I cannot conceive of the author of the Speech Out of the Whirlwind in Job writing or dictating that text and dwelling within common existence and parlance." (Steiner, "The Good Books," The New Yorker [Jan 11, 1988], 97)