You’ve raised a view for me to think about. My dissertation was on Deuteronomy’s theology of exile. One of the things I noted was that the terms for exile are not the normal ones, but death/annihilation terms (e.g., Deut 4:25; 28:63). While I make theological implications of this (i.e., exile = death), it also helps interpret the use of death language elsewehere, e.g., the so-called genocide texts in Joshua (i.e., the kill-them-all texts could be fulfilled by removing the Canaanites from the land and not necessarily literally killing them).