Exile in the Bible: An Ethic of Loyalty and Subversion
The New Testament authors sometimes associate Jesus’ loving resistance and subversive loyalty with previous Israelites like Daniel and his friends, who learned to stay true to Yahweh while suffering injustice in exile. Their loyal love for Yahweh stood in stark contrast to the Babylonian empire, and Jesus’ loyal love for humanity subverts human power structures too. This subversive loyalty is something we can think of as “the way of exile.”