Never in history, since the creation of Adam, has man been completely destroyed from the earth, we ourselves are descended from Adam. The inhabitants of these "cities" were in fact the angelic host, the B'nai Elohim, before the rebellion.
The exact words of Genesis 1:2 "and the earth was (became) formless and void", are recorded in chapter 4 verse 26 of Jeremiah.
The majority of Christian scholars believe Gen. 1:2 means that the earth was created in an imperfect state. Genesis 1:1 lays the reality of creation out clearly:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The next sentence, "and the earth was formless and void", is in error in most English translations.
It should read, "and the earth became formless and void." The Hebrew word translated "was formless" in English versions of the Bible is "toh-ho" a verb which means, "to lay waste".
God does not create confusion, He creates order out of nothing. Satan on the other hand, corrupted what God had already created in perfection.
However, I cannot help your argument as I do not have your understanding of either Genesis or of Rahab.
Rahab appears both as the name of the harlot and as a word for pride or strength and is a metaphor for Egypt. (Isaiah, Psalms, etc.) The Spirit does not lead me to any further understanding of the word or the existence of other planets, etc.
With regard to Genesis, my understanding is also very much different from years - however it is consistent with the ancient Hebrew translations. For comparison:
A great article which explains why 6 days at the inception space/time coordinates are equal to roughly 14 billion years at our earthy space/time coordinates. The words in Genesis 1 are analyzed in context of Jewish understanding over the years. Here are a few excerpts:
... The Talmud (Chagiga, ch. 2), in trying to understand the subtleties of Torah, analyzes the word "choshech." When the word "choshech" appears in Genesis 1:2, the Talmud explains that it means black fire, black energy, a kind of energy that is so powerful you can't even see it. Two verses later, in Genesis 1:4, the Talmud explains that the same word - "choshech" - means darkness, i.e. the absence of light.
Other words as well are not to be understood by their common definitions. For example, "mayim" typically means water. But Maimonides says that in the original statements of creation, the word "mayim" may also mean the building blocks of the universe. Another example is Genesis 1:5, which says, "There is evening and morning, Day One." That is the first time that a day is quantified: evening and morning. Nachmanides discusses the meaning of evening and morning. Does it mean sunset and sunrise? It would certainly seem to.
But Nachmanides points out a problem with that. The text says "there was evening and morning Day One... evening and morning a second day... evening and morning a third day." Then on the fourth day, the sun is mentioned. Nachmanides says that any intelligent reader can see an obvious problem. How do we have a concept of evening and morning for the first three days if the sun is only mentioned on Day Four? We know that the author of the Bible - even if you think it was a bunch of Bedouins sitting around a campfire at night - one thing we know is that the author was smart. He or she or it produced a best-seller. For thousands of years! So you can't attribute the sun appearing only on Day Four to foolishness. There's a purpose for it on Day Four. And the purpose is that as time goes by and people understand more about the universe, you can dig deeper into the text.
Nachmanides says the text uses the words "Vayehi Erev" - but it doesn't mean "there was evening." He explains that the Hebrew letters Ayin, Resh, Bet - the root of "erev" - is chaos. Mixture, disorder. That's why evening is called "erev", because when the sun goes down, vision becomes blurry. The literal meaning is "there was disorder." The Torah's word for "morning" - "boker" - is the absolute opposite. When the sun rises, the world becomes "bikoret", orderly, able to be discerned. That's why the sun needn't be mentioned until Day Four. Because from erev to boker is a flow from disorder to order, from chaos to cosmos. That's something any scientist will testify never happens in an unguided system. Order never arises from disorder spontaneously. There must be a guide to the system. That's an unequivocal statement.
Scriptures and Origins - an article I wrote about Genesis through the Patriarchs, including a few references to Enoch