Okay, I find it a little ridiculous that some people try to explain such biblical experiences of things like fire in the sky as simply mistaking a volcanic eruption or a lightening strike for the presence of God, mostly because in order to believe this one has to dumb down the people to a point where it wouldn't have been possible to get such a literal descriptions in the first place. These people knew what lightening was, they knew what volcanic eruptions were -- because they wrote about those too -- so if they write about a strange phenomenon like fire in the sky and believe it to be a result of God's fury or protection that is because it was fire in the sky. Now, I agree that maybe it wasn't God creating it, it could have been some natural phenomenon (one that just hasn't seemed to repeat itself ever again even though it happened so much in the past) but it wasn't a volcano or lightening. These people in the Bible were not idiots. They built entire civilizations and wrote epic works that can still be read today, and while there may have been many idiots amongst them, the people as a whole were not idiots, and therefore would not have allowed such mistakes to be recorded in such important works of literature.