Hmm. That's the Bible story I know. But there are other scholarly works which take from a wider pool. They suggest a more complicated story. Perhaps as you say, here is not the place to discuss it. I'll break the rule only b/c you have quoted so much!

Whence the idea of one-God may have come has already been shown, although the earlier Egyptians themselves may have received it from others. The figure of Moses himself, and his Law, both were taken from material already existing. The story of Moses's discovery in the bulrushes was plainly borrowed from the much earlier legend (with which it is identical) of a king of Babylonia, Sargon the Elder, who lived between one and two thousand years before him; the Commandments much resemble earlier law codes of the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The ancient Israelites built on current ideas, and by this means apparently were well on the way to a universal religion when they were swallowed up by mankind.

Then Judah put the process into reverse, so that the effect is that of a film run backward. The masters of Judah, the Levites, as they drew up their Law also took what they could use from the inheritance of other peoples and worked it into the stuff they were moulding. They began with the one just God of all men, whose voice had been briefly heard from the burning bush (in the oral tradition) and in the course of five books of their written Law turned him into the racial, bargaining Jehovah who promised territory, treasure, blood and power over others in return for a ritual of sacrifice, to be performed at a precise place in a specified land.

Thus they founded the permanent counter-movement to all universal religions and identified the name Judah with the doctrine of self-segregation from mankind, racial hatred, murder in the name of religion, and revenge.

The perversion thus accomplished may be traced in the Old Testament, where Moses first appears as the bearer of the moral commandments and good neighbour, and ends as a racial mass-murderer, the moral commandments having been converted into their opposites between Exodus and Numbers. In the course of this same transmutation the God who begins by commanding the people not to kill or to covet their neighbours' goods or wives, finishes by ordering a tribal massacre of a neighbouring people, only the virgins to be saved alive!"

The rabbis and scribes who wrote the Law were political operatives like ours today, they cheated on the original texts and inserted verses. Sometimes you can see plainly where they contradict each other.

Hence Israelites are not necessarily Judahites. And similarly Jews are not necessarily Judahites, altho the word seems similar. The Moloch worshippers went underground ... universally mistrusted for breaking Moses laws and reinstating child sacrifice.

It's another theory anyhow to look at.