It's very important to understand that the Old Testament should be interpreted according to the historical-grammatical method. The primary question driving the interpretive process should be, what did this mean in its original historical context? 

This leaves room for symbolism, if that symbolism was intended by the original author. And it also leaves room for a literal approach, if the author intended something to be taken according to its plain, literal sense.

 

Many Christians go astray here because they either 

A) think that the NT justifies a strictly spiritual, Christological, or non-historical grammatical approach to the OT, or 

B) because they fall into a rigid fundamentalism that does not leave enough room for symbolic and figurative readings that are a part of the historical meaning. 

These are two sides of the same erroneous coin. 

The NT will never fundamentally alter the historical meaning of an OT text, and the OT will never fit within the framework of simplistic literalism. You always start with what the passage meant in it's original, historical context, being open to varying degrees of symbolism and literalism, and then once you have that figured out, you can also make spiritual and Christological applications of the OT text that complement, but never negate, the original meaning.- Travis M Snow