It would have been simpler if "God" had simply stated all animals except Noah's family and one pair of the unclean & 7 pairs of the clean will now die. Why go through the rigamarole of a global flood.
Two birds with one stone. After Marduk defeated Tiamat and divided her body to make the firmament with the earth in the centre, the El/YHWH guy had to deal with all that water that was held back. He knew that the firmament wasn't going to hold indefinitely (humans would eventually start trying to break through it...) so he decided to pierce holes in the top and bottom of Tiamat's body. That was one bird: the mess left by the Babylonian religion that needed sorting out.
The second bird was the terrible wickedness of mankind. He killed that one literally, using the first bird as the stone. It's very clever like that.
So basically God threw one bird at another bird, killed them both and drowned the world.
But seriously: Genesis is more of an attempt to describe God's evolving relationship with mankind. The God of Genesis, elohim, was much like Zeus. He was a physically present being (later in Exodus he'll travel with the Jews in a special tent), who was limited in his knowledge of humans (he had some prophesy and manipulation abilities, but it was not entirely perfect).
His first attempt was to create two of them, and try and keep them 'captive' in a garden of paradise. They rebelled against this and became partially divine in nature, with a sense of morality and the will to do wrong. Then God sort of let them go about their business and tried to let them find their own destiny, trusting that eventually they would initiate a relationship with him perhaps. It failed, there was no easy going back. This time, he chose one family (Noah's) of people to survive and hoped their goodness would be heritable.
This didn't pan out too well, so he got down and personal and started micromanaging one bloodline to realize his great vision. He would create a great nation out of the loins of Abraham, eventually. After a loooong time. Indeed, we're still kind of waiting for it to pan out since the children of Israel are still fairly thin on the ground compared with those nations (compare with the population of Egypt).
So - God killed everyone as part of his experiments in 'how to best deal with a creature which has the power to defy me'. He quickly realized it was a really stupid way of dealing with humans, and promised not to do it again. So that's OK. Who hasn't inadvertantly murdered hundreds of thousands of people in an effort to develop a relationship with them?
Ultimately, though it isn't the party line, God was an evolving character throughout Genesis and Exodus with the occasional
massacre learning experience, argument, bargaining and the like. He didn't start off as 'omnipotent' in the sense our imagination has come to understand. Though the creation is represented as a 'let there be...and there was' kind of guy, the following chapters has him wandering around chatting to people. Why bother asking Adam where he is? God is everywhere and all knowing. Why ask Adam why he hides his nudity, he knows your heart. Clearly, this is a lesser deity than the perfect celestial dictator, though still pretty damn impressive.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.
No - I don't believe a cosmic Jewish zombie can make me live forever if I eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that I accept him as my master, so he can then remove an evil force from my soul that is present in all of humanity because a dirt/rib woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree about 6,000 years ago just after the universe was created. Why should I?
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