For Setswana speakers however, I can better convey exactly what it meant. When I say “Ijahh! A ngwana wa motho a itsamaele’ it is understood that I am speaking of myself as a poor, blameless soul who deems it best to walk out of a nasty situation without antagonising anyone. Here, as in scripture, ngwana wa motho (innocent, blameless soul) can still be erroneously translated as ‘son of Man’. In reality, it was applicable to almost anyone who was being led into, or finds himself in, a difficult situation not of his doing (see, for example, Ezekiel 2:1).
So, when John speaks of one like a son of man (this is how my New American Standard Bible correctly translates Revelation 14:14) he was subtly telling us that this was an innocent man who, by some contrivance of ‘Fate’, finds himself in the thick of things; commanded by war-mongering ‘angels’ to sink his “sharpened sickle into the ground” – which metaphors I explained in a recent article. It is easy to determine when such End Times were to come. In Daniel 8:13-14 they were to come 2300 ‘days’ from the Artaxerxes Decree of BC 457. When we apply the prophetic formula of ‘one day for every year’ as elucidated in Numbers 13:34 (see also Ezekiel 4:6), this amounts to 2300 years, leading to AD 1844.
