Two Visions, One Book - that's just the way it is
Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan argues in his book, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now , that in the biblical tradition, both Old and New Testaments, two incompatible and contradictory explanations of God’s final victory over the evil and injustice of the world run side by side, often in the same biblical books. One explanation is extermination. It is reflected in the Noachic solution to evil in the world, namely, the complete destruction of the wicked. Crossan writes, "In this vision, God’s solution to the problem of human violence is the Great Final Battle in which good triumphs over evil—and triumphs, let us be clear, by divine violence. The symbolic place of that cosmic cleanup as cosmic slaughter is at Har Magiddo in Hebrew (hence our English “Armageddon”), the mountain pass where the spine of Israel’s hill country cuts westward toward the coast and skirts a great plain suitable for battle." Examples of this approach can be found in Mica...