Comatose said-
The simple fact is they did not know the Hebrew god. They were born and raised and lived in their culture. They didn't know Yahweh and then leave him. They were wiped off the land (according to the bible) and had their preteen and virgin teen daughters taken as spoils of war after their baby boys were slaughtered with no mercy, because they did not know better (according to the only true god who never told them different).
What horrible people! How shameful to do things they didn't know were wrong.
And typically these JWs are improperly projecting their modern environment and freedoms upon those who lived in the past, forgetting that we usually live in a World that is largely freed from State Gods and where people CHOOSE what religion they'll be. They're ignorantly assuming that people had the right to reject the National deity in the past.
If you lived in ancient Greece circa 500 BC, it was a death penalty offense to reject the accepted pantheon of Greek Gods, since to profess a belief in the God of another Nation meant you were a traitor of your OWN people.
So it wasn't like you had a CHOICE, anyway: it truly was that some had the misfortune of being born into the wrong clan, and wouldn't even be exposed to other ideas, since there was NOTHING you could do about it EVEN IF you knew. The Jews were told not to associate with Gentiles and foreigners, since that kind of international goodwill was BAD, and that was the whole point of later efforts to tighten up hatred of foreigners (preventing marriage to foreigners, aka xenophobia).