First, let's look at the audience.
Genesis is a narrative of several different stories. It's not a recording of a person telling a story but more of a narrative. The audience would have been the Israelites who had come out of the land of Egypt. In Egypt, they were slaves who worked seven days a week. Their whole identity rested on their work and the production of bricks. Now that we have our audience, let us look at Genesis 1
Before we continue, let's note that creation was divided incorrectly by the Biblical interpreters. Genesis one should have ended with the passages in Genesis 2:1-3.
The narrative of creation is a poem as we see in the patterns and refrains.
Note: The poetic, parallel structure, of the creation story does not support nor negate whether the account is literal or figurative. Lately, many who support the literal creation story have gotten upset at the fact that Genesis 1 is a Hebrew parallelism. Most of the Bible is written in either a parallelism or a Chiastic Structure but these structures never negate the facts of the story or the ways in which they happened.
When we look at this poem we see some difficulties. First, we view a day as morning and evening and yet Genesis records a day as evening and morning. Also, we see plants are created on three but the sun is not created until day four, and yet the plants need the sun. Since all of history records a day based on the movement of the sun and the sun is not created until the fourth day then how do we know the days in the first three days? If there's no sun, how do we know evening and morning on days one, two, and three?
The fact is, this poem is not a scientific telling of how the planet was made. There's much more going on here.
The Jewish people understand literature through pictures more than through analytical thinking and beliefs.
What we notice about the poem is creating and about resting. The creation is more obvious than resting because we tend to look at it from a Western perspective and in a language other than Hebrew. Let's look closer at this poem.
If we look at day five we see that fish go in water and birds in the sky so this day tends to correspond with day two. The sun, moon, and stars go in the place where there is light which places day for with day one. Then we have animals and humans which inhabit the land and that corresponds with day three.
If we look at the first three days we see that God does not create in those days but rather separates. It's in days four, five, and six, God fills the things he's separated in the first three days.
What we see is a literary structure called a parallelism.
The amazing thing about this text is the chiastic structure as well, This structure can mainly be seen by the original Hebrew text but some translations done well in converting this over; NIV is one such translation. If you look at the structure, the first day is a small paragraph, the second a medium paragraph, the third day a large paragraph, the fourth day a large paragraph, and the fifth day a medium paragraph, and the sixth day a small paragraph if not for the recording of the creation of man.
Let's look at a few cadences of this poem. The obvious is "evening and morning" and "it was good" but there are other patterns. We seen the parallelism of three days matching three days so is there structures of three?
We first notice this God was Creator, Spirit, and Word so we have three in the God of the story. We also have the word create that appears in three different places (beginning, middle, and end); and in the end it appears three times in rapid fire in the last few verses.
There are seven days in creation so we may expect a pattern of seven. When looking at the Hebrew text, there's seven words in the first verse and fourteen words in the second verse. The word "earth" appears twenty-one times (7x3). There are thirty-five words in the seventh verse (7x5 of verse 7). The word God is mentioned thirty-five times. The phrase "it was so" and "God saw" appears seven times.
So we understand a chiasm points toward the center which points towards the treasure. Chiasm's can be identified by the bookends which will help you find the center.
In Genesis, the creation started with "the earth was formless and empty", from the Hebrew ṯôhû ḇôhû which is chaotic nothingness. The end of the poem is God resting which is nothingness. The story is bookended by nothingness. If you count inward from here you find a Hebrew word at the center which is mô‘êḏ which is translated "seasons" (Genesis 1:14). As expected, this word seasons appears in day four where God creates the sun, moon, and stars to mark the "seasons". This Hebrew word is also used to translate into the day "sabbath" as in the "sabbath festivals". It's what we see at the end of the poem and what He calls His people back to.
The reason why Sabbath is so important to the Jewish people is because the Bible starts with a focus on Sabbath.
Going back to the original audience, we understand that the Israelites who were slaves put their value of their life on the production of bricks. God wanted to establish a new line of thinking within His people. He wanted them to know the value of their life did not revolve around the number of bricks they can make, it did not revolve around the work you did. Your value and worth does not come from what you produce but rather from who you are.
When you look at day seven we see God resting. Is He tired? No, He's put everything in place and there's nothing more He can do to creation. He's now taking time to enjoy the creation He has made.
I want you to notice that the "evening and morning" refrain is absent from the seventh day. It's as if the author is hanging the seventh day out so that it is perpetual, it's ever lasting. We need to get out of that Egyptian mindset that our worth revolves around what we produce. Not that we are to be lazy but that our worth is in who we are and not what we produce.
Going back to the "evening and morning" refrain, in the Jewish world the day begins when the sun goes down. In the Jewish mindset, your day does not begin with production, it begins with resting. Your day begins with resting because your identity begins with who you are created by God and not what you do.
There is a practical rest, a real and literal rest, that is needed, and even commanded. It's not commanded as a law as much as it's about a sign showing us how much God loves us (Mark 2:27). The fact that a practical Sabbath still exists is why there's a spiritual battle against it. Whether scheduling in the secular world against Sabbath or condemnation against Sabbath is the religious world, there is a battle against this wonderful day of rest give to us to show we have more value than what we do.
Sabbath is also metaphorical; it's not just practical. It's a posture we carry through life. We carry a posture of fear and insecurity based on our view of what makes us valuable but if we understand that God sees His creation as good it then affects the way we live.