Is the Bible Perfectly Precise or Fully True?

"The word inerrancy does have a certain disadvantage...The word has come to suggest to many the idea of precision, rather than...mere truth. Now, precision and truth are not synonyms, though they do overlap in meaning. A certain amount of precision is often required for truth, but that but that amount varies from one context to another. In mathematics and science, truth often requires considerable precision. If a student says that 6 + 5 = 10, he has not told the truth. He has committed an error. If a scientist makes a measurement varying by .0004 cm of an actual length, he may describe that as an error, as in the phrase margin of error. 

But outside of science and mathematics, truth and precision are often much more distinct. If you ask someone's age, the person's conventional response...is to tell how old he was on his most recent birthday. But this is, of course, imprecise. It would be precise to tell one's age down to the day, hour, minute, and second. But would that convey more truth? And if one fails to give that much precision, has he made an error? I think not, as we use the terms truth and error in ordinary language. If someone seeks to tell his age down to the second, we usually say that he has told us more than we want to know. The question "What is your age?" does not demand that level of precision. Indeed, when someone gives excess information in an effort to be more precise, he actually frustrates the process of communication, hindering, rather than communicating truth. He buries his real age under a torrent of irrelevant words...

We must always remember that Scripture is, for the most part, ordinary language rather than technical language. Certainly, it is not of the modern scientific genre. In Scripture, God intends to speak to everybody. To do that most efficiently, he (through the human writers) engages in all the shortcuts that we commonly use among ourselves to facilitate conversation: imprecisions, metaphors, hyperbole, parables, and so forth. Not all these convey literal truth, or truth with a precision expected in specialized contexts; but they all convey truth, and in the Bible there is no reason to charge them with error.  

Inerrancy, therefore, means that the Bible is true, not that it is maximally precise. To the extent that precision is necessary for truth, the Bible is sufficiently precise. But it does not always have the amount of precision that some readers demand of it. It has a level of precision sufficient for its own purposes, not for the purposes for which some readers might employ it."

--John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God (2010 A.D.)

 http://www.amazon.com/The-Doctrine-Word-Theology-Lordship/dp/0875522645