The resurrection of the dead was but one of any number of miraculous events that Jewish biblical and postbiblical traditions anticipated as marking the Endtimes, and the establishment of God’s Kingdom. Not only would life be restored to the dead; the ten tribes of Israel, “lost” to the Assyrian conquest in the eighth century B.C.E., would also be restored to the nation, “gathered in” with the exiles of Israel. In the final battle between good and evil, the forces of good—led by an archangel, or perhaps by a warrior of King David’s house, the messiah—would definitively prevail. The righteous would be vindicated, the wicked punished. The false gods of the nations, subdued in their turn, would themselves acknowledge the god of Israel. Their peoples and former worshipers, the pagan nations, would themselves stream to Jerusalem, to worship together with Israel on God’s holy mountain. God would pour out divine spirit upon eschatological humanity. And the mother city of the wide-flung Jewish nation, Jerusalem, restored and resplendent, would shine in the End as the place of God’s presence, the seat of his Kingdom. - Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews.