If the exile itself was seen as a ‘death’, and therefore return from exile as a ‘resurrection’, it is not a long step to see the death of Israel as in some sense sacrificial, so that the exile becomes not simply a time when she languishes in Babylon, serving a forlorn sentence in a foreign land, but actually a time through which the sin she has committed is expiated. The exile, it seems, was to be seen both as a punishment for the nation in its wickedness, and as in some sense a vocation to a righteous bearing of sin and evil. This step was taken explicitly in the fourth of the Servant Songs
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