I understand what you're saying. But the scriptures actually specifies a day for each part of creation. So it was 6 days with each having an evening and a morning.
ʿErev (עֶרֶב, “evening”) and
boqer (בֹּקֶר, “morning”) establish a
recurring sequence; they do
not, by themselves, define the length of each
yôm (יוֹם) as 24 modern hours. You’re assuming that because your English KJV simplistically renders
yôm as ‘day’ over and over.
That’s like seeing the English word ‘bank’ ten times and insisting it must mean a financial institution every time, even when one sentence is clearly talking about the side of a river and another is talking about a bank shot in billiards.
And the sun is not appointed to govern the day until
Day 4. So the text gives you ordered periods marked by evening and morning, but it does
not explicitly define Days 1–3 as 24-hour solar days measured by the sun.
And the rigid 24-hour reading gets bizarre fast.
On
Yom 5, the seas are suddenly full of the great
tannînîm and swarming creatures.
Then, basically one sleep later,
Yom 6 explodes with land animals, giant reptiles, predators, livestock, creeping things and then humanity shows up at the end of the same 24-hour block.
So under that reading, Adam is effectively stepping into a brand-new world where massive predatory animals have existed for, what, a few hours? God basically creates Jurassic Park and then, one 24-hour period later, drops Adam and Eve into it and calls the whole arrangement “very good”? That reading starts sounding stranger than the text itself.
