<p>Did anyone ever notice that there are no Jews in the Torah? Just Israelites. The very idea of Jews, as a people not tied to the conquering of the land (“Kill every man, woman, and child among them, for the land is thine”), but as a people now living among the nations, and especially as a people without political power, is a much later concept, beginning some 500 years later, and not codified in the Talmud until about 1,200 years later. </p>
<p>Of course, there was the interim period of the Macabees, the Taliban of its time, in which a fundamentalist sect killed thousands of their own kind, until after the last Hasmonean king in a fit began boiling other Jews in oil (literally), the remaining Jews begged the Romans to take over control of Judaea, resulting in the very forward thinking reign of Herod the Elder.</p>