No, Herodotus does not report that the flood-tide was "miraculous" at all. He reports it as an entirely natural event. He says that the timing of this "natural" event was ordained by the gods as punishment for sacrilege and H says he believes it -- not, like the omniscient novelist who knows what's going on up in heaven, that God sent it.lpetrich wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2017 10:17 am From Introduction: Was Christianity Too Improbable to be False?, by Richard Carrier, Would the Facts Be Checked? Note 5:. . . . Yet Herodotus reports without a hint of doubt that, just a generation or two before he wrote, . . . a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon; a horse gave birth to a rabbit. . . . ).
Even the interpretation of the reason for this natural event is given as a report, not like a novelist saying "God dit it." The historian says he believes a report he hears and allows readers to know the status of his belief; the novelist simply says God, a character, did X and Y.
But there is one example in all of those listed that is indeed reported as fact:This is how Timoxenus' treachery was brought to light. But when Artabazus had besieged Potidaea for three months, there was a great ebb-tide in the sea which lasted for a long while, and when the foreigners saw that the sea was turned to a marsh, they prepared to pass over it into Pallene.
[2] When they had made their way over two-fifths of it, however, and three yet remained to cross before they could be in Pallene, there came a great flood-tide, higher, as the people of the place say, than any one of the many that had been before. Some of them who did not know how to swim were drowned, and those who knew were slain by the Potidaeans, who came among them in boats.
[3] The Potidaeans say that the cause of the high sea and flood and the Persian disaster lay in the fact that those same Persians who now perished in the sea had profaned the temple and the image of Poseidon which was in the suburb of the city. I think that in saying that this was the cause they are correct. Those who escaped alive were led away by Artabazus to Mardonius in Thessaly. This is how the men who had been the king's escort fared.
So we have it. Of all the passages that were listed as examples of how Herodotus supposedly writes like an omniscient novelist that miracles just happen because God orders them to as if that's a fact -- of all the examples we do have this one that is actually valid.When all had passed over and were ready for the road, a great portent appeared among them. Xerxes took no account of it, although it was easy to interpret: a mare gave birth to a hare. The meaning of it was easy to guess: Xerxes was to march his army to Hellas with great pomp and pride, but to come back to the same place fleeing for his life.
[2] There was another portent that was shown to him at Sardis: a mule gave birth to a mule that had double genitals, both male and female, the male above the other. But he took no account of either sign and journeyed onward; the land army was with him.
And I did not bother to go through listing examples from Herodotus myself to support my own case because I assumed that anyone who has read H knows what he writes and how he writes it. There are scores of examples. Occasionally, however, Herodotus does indeed slip into the standard literary trope of reporting prodigies just prior to a great disaster as if they were fact.
I suggest that such instances are the exception rather than the rule.