Genesis 1: Schematic?

This may have come up in some earlier posting, but if so, I would not know how to search for it with any efficiency. But I'll go ahead anyway:Day 1: Day and night
Day 2: Sky and sea
Day 3: LandDay 4: Sun and Moon
Day 5: Birds and fish/sea-monsters
Day 6: Land-animals/humanityDay 7: The first Sabbath in the history of the Universe, celebrated by a very satisfied DeityNotice the correspondence -- the first three days are the creation of environments, while the second three days are the creation of the inhabitants of each environment created three days before. Yes, Gen 1:16 pictures the Sun as an inhabitant of the day, and the Moon an inhabitant of the night.Turning to other creations, plants are created as environment items rather than as inhabitants. They are created in Day 3, with the Earth being commanded to produce them, and they are made available for various inhabitants in Day 6, the corresponding "plant inhabitant" day.About the stars, being created in the second three days means that they are inhabitants. And being celestial, they are created in Day 4, almost as an afterthought.This explains a variety of oddities:Separation of light/day from darkness/night
Creation of daytime 3 days before the Sun was created
Creation of plants before the Sun
Creation of birds before land animalsAnd it clarifies the status of plants and why they are not viewed as really alive -- they are viewed as environment rather than as inhabitants.The Genesis 2 creation story, however, does not seem quite as schematic.Someone else had posted here about various schematic-looking numbers in the Bible; Genesis 1 might be interesting to add to that.

You guys seem to have gotten into an argument over the G1 vs. the G2 creation stories; I'd started my thread on the structure of the G1 story. Do you people think that it's a reasonable analysis or not?For my part, it seems like an attempt to construct some sort of cosmogonic theory, though one that's far from anything that we've found out over the last few centuries. Here's another way of expressing the pattern:Environment - InhabitantCelestial:
Light - Sun
Dark - Moon
() - StarsFar Terrestrial:
Air - Birds
Water - Fish, Sea MonstersNear Terrestrial:
Earth - Land Animals, Humanity
Plants - "You may eat them"However, plants as environment vs. animals as inhabitants is absurd by the standards of modern biology, and is questionable even by what was easily knowable at the time.Plants and animals grow and reproduce.
When they die, their corpses decompose.
It's possible to live off of both plant and animal flesh.Meaning that plants are too animal-like to be worth calling environment items.Aristotle's three kinds of soul, the vegetable soul, the animal soul, and the rational soul, seems much more reasonable. At least when interpreted as sets of features:Vegetable soul - ability to grow and reproduce
Animal soul - ability to move around and quickly respond to one's environment
Rational soul - ability to think and communicate in full-scale languageHowever, modern biology recognizes a variety of boundary-blurrers, like intracellular and intra-organism signaling, flagellate algae and (non-human) animal cognitive and communicative abilities, so Aristotle's schema is not quite useful.