In accounts of earlier peoples, the outward meaning consists of the events and circumstances actually reported. Their inward benefit is recognizing grounds for praise or blame, relations between conduct and consequence, and morally relevant lessons.
Historical narratives can teach that truthfulness, gratitude, rebellion, and injustice matter. Yet one may not treat every later historical event as an exact repetition and then confidently assign it the same unseen divine verdict.
Result: the narrated reality is retained while disciplined ethical insight is drawn from it; the account is not reduced to a story that never happened.