Everything begins, and events unfurl, from Zion, that is, from God’s “holy mountain,” Jerusalem. 

Further: it would be to Jerusalem that all the families of man, at the End time, would flow. Biblical tradition had long distinguished the human family as comprised of two groups. The first, by far the smallest, was Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their plenum number, at the End, corresponding to Jacob’s twelve sons and grandsons, would be all twelve tribes. “The nations,” by far the larger group, were themselves divided into seventy “families” or “peoples,” the biblical number derived from the total count of descent-groups from the three sons of Noah in Genesis 10. These seventy nations are distinguished from each other according to their kinship groups, their lands, and their languages. All humanity, in brief, is summed up in this eschatological arithmetic: the twelve tribes of Israel and the seventy nations. - Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews.