Patrick:
The OT contains a lot of genocide by God. Given that history has shown that a global flood genocide didn’t occur 4350 years ago killing all but 8 people, and all animals to two each, the God of Noah looks to be an imaginary God of a fictitious myth story. History has also shown that all genocides were done by people against other people, making God unnecessary in any genocide.
There’s some discussion on this topic that’s relevant here . It appears there’s good reason to think a lot of that OT genocide was inaccurate translation …
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking. The verb choice is not much different than “kill” other than it focuses more on removal from the earth. Reasonable local flood interpretations (assuming one accepts biblical authority) include: (1) taking the universal language (all, every, the earth) as hyperbole (as done by Longman and Walton ); (2) understand “earth” to be “land” (i.e., a limited region); (3) taking “earth” as the known world from the author’s perspective; or (4) taking “earth” to be the world that the author cares about (though he technically knows of other peoples beyond this scope). Of course, one could understand the Bible to be teaching a universal (i.e., global) flood, but consider it mistaken due to modern scientific and historical knowledge.