Huh? The Israelites were for killing people during wartime, and the various cultures that interpreted that law all bent it to exclude the deaths they wanted to cause.

Oh, of course you take into account what the Israelites considered murder, and whatever meaning they would have embedded into whatever word it was that is translated into murder or kill. But what we cannot reasonably do is plug in our moral values around killing. Being as we are a culture of immoral infidels by the standards of the law in question! (Gentiles too come to think of it.) What we consider moral killings is damn near irrelevant.