Genesis opens with the earth formless and empty, darkness over the face of the deep, and the spirit or wind of God moving over the waters. God speaks, light comes into being and is divided from the darkness, and that is the first day. On the second a vault is set in the midst of the waters to divide the waters below from the waters above. On the third the lower waters are gathered so that dry land appears, and the land puts forth vegetation of its own accord. The first three days are acts of separation and the next three are acts of filling: on the fourth the sun, moon and stars are set in the vault to rule day and night and to mark the festivals and the years; on the fifth the waters swarm with living creatures and birds fly across the face of the vault; and on the sixth the land brings forth animals, after which God makes humanity, male and female, in the divine image, blesses them, and gives them charge of the rest.
Every act is announced with the same formula, that God said and it was so, and almost every one closes with the judgment that it was good. On the seventh day the work is complete, God ceases from it, and the day itself is blessed and set apart, which is the reason the text offers for the Sabbath rather than any argument drawn from nature or from agriculture. Readers from antiquity onward have noticed that the account is built as a structure rather than a chronicle, with the domains made in the first three days occupied by their rulers in the second three, and a substantial line of modern scholarship reads the whole as a temple-building pattern in which the world is made as a dwelling and the seventh day is its dedication.