Define literal vs non-literal.

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According to the Genesis text, there was no way to "indicate seasons and days and years" until Day 4. Hence it is wrong to argue any specific length of time for Days 1-3 from the text. It is wrong to argue that they were instantaneous, it is wrong to argue that they were 24 hours, it is wrong to argue that they were millions of years. The text leaves them indeterminate.

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I think that you are exaggerating here.Genesis 1:5 pretty clearly indicates that the day/night cycle was in place and that there were mornings and evenings. There seems to be no need of further markers to note the alternation of light and darkness or any reason to think that the time periods were any different than from now. The markers may provide more precision, but they do not change the actual time periods.By my understanding, to the Jews, moonrise denotes the start of the new day. Thus without the moon there is no way to know precisely when the next day starts. Likewise, the use of sundials was known, which represents a method of time-telling which would be impossible if there were merely a sunless alternation of light and dark (and even without a sundial the position of the sun in the sky is of use here).Thus it seems far more likely to me that Genesis 1:14 simply refers to markers to better enable measurement of time, rather than any fundamental change in the time period of a day. The day/night alternation is set up well before then and there is nothing to suggest any actual change in that period at all - certainly not from millions of years down to twenty-four hours !

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Perhaps. But with your reading, I see no compelling need for markers to "indicate seasons and days and years." These could be counted from the day/night cycles.

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Granted that they might be, but is it not the case that astronomical observations were used as seasonal markers in the ancient Middle East ? Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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Yes, I believe this is true. But the light-bearers are also to indicate "days", implying that a "day" was ill-defined before Day 4.

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A point already addressed. Moonrise marks the start of the day in Jewish tradition, even if now there are calculations to use as an alternative when the moon is not visible. Thus the day would be "ill-defined" without the moon even though the time periods involved are the same.

As I have pointed out in my earlier posts, all we can reliably say is that in the story the markers that allow humans to precisely tell the time are missing. However, it is one thing to say that a human on the ground - if there were any - might make an error in determining the start of the day and quite another to say that the period of the day was different.Given that there is nothing in the story to imply even the slightest change in the actual period, and given that we would need a huge difference in the actual period to be significant (even if a "day" were a year or a decade or even a century it would not really matter) the absence of the markers seems to be an irrelevance.

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But I don't see anything in the text to suggest that the author is concerned about the lengths of the Days. I believe he is, in fact, trying to de-emphasize the length of the days by mentioning that the indicators of time don't appear until Day 4.

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I don't see how that makes sense at all. After all if the moon cannot be seen to rise it does not mean that the length of the Jewish day has changed, only that the start of the day cannot be precisely identified. On the other hand the references to mornings and evenings seems to emphasise the idea that - despite the lack of markers - we are dealing with the same duration as a solar day.It seems more likely to me that he was trying to de-emphasise the importance of the heavenly bodies by relegating them to a later point in creation and demoting them to mere markers of time.

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I don't believe I've claimed that "the length of the Jewish day has changed," have I? My position is that time is indefinite/indeterminate on the first three Days, and that the author is not trying to emphasize the length of the Days.

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I didn't say that you had. What I was pointing out is that the absence of the markers is irrelevant to the duration of a day - they are simply a means of more accurately determining the division between one day and the next, or between day and night. Imprecision at the level of minutes or hours does not seem to be of any significance to this discussion.I also find it hard to understand why the absence of precise markers should be considered a de-emphasis (which WAS your claim) of the duration, unless you mean only that some of the creative work might have slightly slipped into the next day. (Let me add that to the best of my understanding the scientific evidence indicates that the length of a day has increased over time, not hugely decreased !). If the author meant to convey that the period of time was hugely indeterminate - rather than being an ordinary day - I would have expected rather more evidence of that than something that suggests the possibility of an error in working out the duration on the order of an hour or so.