JimLewandowski Wrote:
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> Since, in Exodus 14 we have "Lord" watching from a
> pillar of fire and cloud, it's wholly consistent
> use of symbolism again.

Blazing meteorites and exploding planets?

I just recently finished reading Barry Strauss's Salamis: The Greatest Naval Battle of the Ancient World., 480 BC (2004).

Here's a little extract:

"[...] And so the battle of Salamis began, at least that is what the Athenians said. The Aeginetans told a different story. They claimed that the first Greek ship to start the attack was not the Athenian vessel of Aminias but the Aeginetan trireme bringing the statues of the Sons of Aeacus. And they attributed the initiative to a miracle. The Aeginetans said that while the Greeks were backing water there appeared an apparition of a woman. She exhorted the Greeks into battle in a voice loud enough for the entire Greek camp to hear. First, however, she gave them a piece of her mind. 'Gentlemen, just how long are you going to keep on backing water?' she asked [...].

"Like the Aeginetans, many of the men who fought at Salamis came away convinced that only the gods could have won the battle for Greece. The numbers of the Persian fleet were so large, the preceding disasters at Thermopylae and on the Athenian Acropolis so awful, the situation of the refugees on Salamis so precarious, the defensive position at the Isthmus so shaky, that it seemed hard to believe that unaided human action had reversed the expected outcome. The Lady of Salamis is not the last divine intervention to be reported of the battle.

"Afterwards, some claimed to have seen a great light shine out from the direction of Eleusis on the mainland, a few miles north of the Straits. They also said that they heard the sound of voices filling the Thriasian plain beyond Eleusis, from the mountains to the sea, as if a crowd of men was participating in a religious procession - as in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were held annually around the very day of the battle. Then out of the shouting crowd a cloud began to rise up little by little from the earth and land on the triremes.

"Others said that they could see the shades of the Sons of Aeacus with their hands stretched out to protect the Greek triremes. Others insisted that the hero Cychreus appeared to Athenian crews in the form of a snake. And it appears that some Aeginetans may have seen something in the sky above the Straits - clouds? the morning star? electrical discharges? - that symbolized the god Apollo and the Dioscuri (that is, the heroes Castor and Polydeuces).

"So the high-pitched religious emotions, the noise and confusion of naval battle, and the Greek habit of competitive bragging all made it difficult to say afterwards precisely how the battle had begun. In fact, it was hard to reconstruct the battle altogether [...]" (pp. 205-206).

In the same book, Strauss reports that:

1) In preparing for his invasion of Greece, Xerxes attempted to bridge the Hellespont to ferry his army across. A storm hampered the first attempt to create a bridge of ships, and in punishment Xerxes had the Hellespont whipped and fettered as punishment.

2) Xerxes sent a force of Persians to attack and loot Delphi. On the outskirts of Delphi the Persians turned back in fear after a violent thunderstorm struck the army with lightning and sent rocks crashing down from Mount Parnassus.

3) At sunrise on the morning before the day of the battle of Salamis an earthquake was felt on both land and sea. The Greeks took this as a sign from heaven. In response to the earthquake, Xerxes ordered the Athenian exiles in his army to go up to the Acropolis to make their peace with the local gods.

4) After the Persian army pulled out of Athens after the battle of Salamis, the Spartans were ready to attack them as they retreated, but decided against it because a partial eclipse that occurred while King Cleombrotus was sacrificing was interpreted as being a bad omen.

Are we supposed to conclude from all of this that the battle of Salamis never occurred, or that it's necessarily some kind of encoded symbolic event that 'literalists' foolishly insist has some connection to real events? Or do such reports of divine action in human affairs suggest that the past is a 'foreign country' and doesn't necessarily conform to our own expectations of what constitutes 'proper' history?