How can you tell which passages in the Bible are symbolic and which ones are literal?

[Gloria_de_G]

How can you tell which passages in the Bible are symbolic and which ones are literal? For example, the 144000 in Revelation is obviously symbolic, and Jesus’ death on the cross is obviously literal. There are some other places though like Genesis (Adam and Eve), the Christmas story, that some people think are symbolic, even though I have always believed in their literal meaning and they actually happened the way it was written.

I am not going to give you an answer for the passages in the whole bible, but for the ones in the Book of Revelation which you wonder.
First of all let me ask you. When Jesus asked his disciples to go and get the donkey to enter into Jerusalem (Mt 21:1-7 and Jn 12:14) to fulfill the Old Testament (OT) prophecy:
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an donkey, on a colt the foal of an donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9) (I can not use the other word for donkey in this forum it writes me ***)

Did Jesus interpret that passage in the OT literally, yes or no?

Well I believe that if Jesus left us this example of taking literally something from the Bible He is not going to give us a Revelation that is symbolic only. Therefore, in the Book of Revelation things that take place in heaven **generally **speaking refer to spiritual realities but things that happen on earth are more literal, **generally **again. You are not going to believe that a beast is going to come out of the ocean, are you? You will need to fantasize and Jesus did not come to make us do that. Therefore the two witnesses are two people (Rev. 11) and the 144,000 are also people, I believe from the Catholic Church, but the 144,000 are very special because they have a very special roll at the end times: they are virgins, did not defiled themselves with women, and no lie was found in their mouth, because they are pure, even in their thoughts.

Therefore, yes, we are to take this literal, but as for the number 144,000 (12x12,000) we read in the Death Sea Scrolls (in the scroll for war) that the king of the Jews will have a very special army of 12 thousand men (1,000 from each tribe) who will be selected to be “men of truth, God-fearers, haters of unjust gain and mighty warriors.” but because in the Revelation they are the army of the King of Kings we are told that there are 12,000 from each tribe of the sons of Israel.(Rev 7:7-8), which could mean the totality of men with those qualities that will be found in those days of the end.

If you want more inf. about what I wrote above, I took it from here:

newtorah.org/175.html

Hope this helps to look for the literal meaning of things in the Book of Revelation,
Gloria