While those survivors we learn are given a chance to marry into Israel instead of starving to death in an empty city, and given special rights and protections if such marriages did not work for them....
There is a bigger question -- why were the cities destroyed, and what about the innocents in them?
I was just answering that for you actually --
Why would a benevolent god condone slavery? (post #293) so I'll just copy it over:
Read to the end please before responding.
You're missing too many details to piece it together, quite reasonably, because you'd have to read fully through several books to get all of the situation/context, to actually know what's happening, the why.
Here's why, and one only learns the full picture in scriptures usually, such as from finding sections like this, because they are
reading through fully --
29 “When the LORD your God
cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land,
30 take care that you be not ensnared to follow them,
after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods?—that I also may do the same.’
[Why are they being destroyed? --]
31 You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the LORD hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods."
The special extreme evil of burning children in fires as sacrifices -- ongoing, routine, permanent as part of their culture -- led to the total destruction of such cities. [and we can learn more about this in other books also]
They were wiped out, with all in them sent on to the Day of Judgement (where all will go in their time) --
where the innocent will be separated out from the guilty. The unrepentant guilty going into the "second death", and
the innocent into Life.
You have to use the full picture from the same Bible you quote trying to make a point. You can't point to my shirt and claim it means I have no shoes, but have to look to see. The same collection of scripture we learn of the total destruction of these cities (which you referred to) also says all will face the Day of Judgment and the innocent and the redeemed and the forgiven will gain Life. Ergo, the children that were killed, all of them, will live forever.