the parallels we have seen between chapter 7 and chapters 1–6 encourage me to assert that in chapter 7 at least, whatever may be the case later on, the natural way of reading the vision is to see the ‘one like the son of man’ as ‘representing’ (in the literary, not the sociological or metaphysical, sense) the ‘people of the saints of the most high’. That is to say, the vision is about the suffering of Israel at the hands of the pagans—more especially, of one pagan monarch in particular, presumably Antiochus Epiphanes—and her coming vindication when the one god reveals himself to be her god and
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