Genesis 1 Structure

With the new editor’s support for tables, I decided to take on the structure of the first creation story in the Bible. Each number is for the day when something is created.

	Environments	Inhabitants
Celestial	1. Day, night	4. Sun, Moon, stars
Far Terrestrial	2. Sea, sky	5. Flying animals, aquatic animals
Near Terrestrial	3. Land, (plants)	6. Land animals, humanity

On the day after these labors, God rested, taking the first day off in the history of the Universe. This is rather obviously a charter myth for the seventh-day Sabbath.

Back to the previous six days, God creates each of these three kinds of environments, and then returns to create their inhabitants. It is very orderly and systematic, and very unlike the second creation story, with its very improvised look. It even fits the factorization of 6 into a product of 2 and 3 — environments vs. inhabitants and three kinds of environments.

This structure explains the oddity of flying animals before land animals, and the story also has the oddity of placing plants in environments rather than in inhabitants.