1:2Meaning
Total removal announced Yahweh declares an intention to “utterly sweep away everything” from “the surface of the earth.” The statement is absolute in scope and is presented as a direct divine declaration (“says Yahweh”), not as a prediction derived from observation.
Unit 2 (v. 3a): A catalog of life swept away
The speech restates the action with a list that moves across land, sky, and sea: humans and animals; birds of the sky; fish of the sea. The piling up of categories communicates that no ordinary boundary (habitat or species) limits the coming removal.
Unit 3 (v. 3b–c): Wickedness and its debris, then the human cutoff
Alongside living creatures, Yahweh says he will sweep away “the heaps of rubble with the wicked,” linking destruction in the environment/built world with the fate of evildoers. The unit ends by repeating that humans will be “cut off” from the earth’s surface, again sealed with “says Yahweh.”