In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the entirety of the structure of the world and our relationship with it can be found on the first three pages of Genesis. Everything that happens forward from there, from the stories of the first ancient peoples, to those of the Hebrew nation starting with Abraham, to a resolution for Christians in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, can draw roots from this introduction. I never realized this until recently, 
thanks to The Bible Project Podcast, which I cannot recommend highly enough, whether you are religious or are curious to know more about the basis for Christianity. This understanding has revolutionized the way I see the entire story of humankind and the earth.
Before any word of creation is spoken, Genesis narrates that the world was Tohu wa-bohu (translations include formless, void, wild and waste).
We find the initial structure of creation, including time and space, as God turning disorder into order. Before any word of creation is spoken, Genesis narrates that the world was Tohu wa-bohu (translations include formless, void, wild and waste). There are many different interpretations of what was actually there, but the wording suggests that the earth did exist in the beginning, at least before God’s first act of speaking, though it was in a “nothingness” state. That changed the way I looked at the creation story as traditionally taught. We like to have definitively established boundaries in describing our world, and are uncomfortable when boundaries get blurred. It is much easier in our minds to comprehend the universe starting at an instant, the beginning of time. We want to think that at some point there was nothing, then suddenly something appeared. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is a bias we should recognize, the need for a firmly established order of events. It is what the singularity of the Big Bang attempts to explain. The same holds true for those of us wanting the creation narrative to say the same thing: a fundamental starting point, a sequence of events, then here we are.
Reading the passages of Genesis 1, I think the story expresses something more about the process of turning chaos into functionality, not specifically the start of something out of nothing, but more so the ordering of material that was already there. In an already existent realm of “wild and waste”, God’s first act of order is the separation of light and dark, our most recognizable form of energy and the lack thereof, of visibility and blindness. A stubbed toe on the foot of the bed in the middle of the night makes it clear to me that the two are separated! More comprehensively, we see different worlds come out whether it is day or night. Take a walk outside your house during the night and day and the sights, sounds, environment, and inhabitants of each time vary extensively. Most notable of the differences may be the sources of light that rule each time period, as described on day 4 (the coinciding function of days 1 and 4 is another fun pattern to talk about later).
Repetition is also a form of order that is established right at the story’s beginning by establishing a recurring pattern of evening and morning. It starts right after the initial proclamation of light and dark and continues throughout the first creation narrative. All that happens from here on out through Genesis 1, happens within the confines of repeating organized days.
The first creation day appears to establish order around the functional concept of time, rather than the start of something material out of nothing, as the watery abyss was already present before the first word in Genesis 1:2. The second day of creation is more concerned with the first ordering of the space that is present, namely waters. Waters above, heaven, separated from waters below, on Earth. Just as day 4 bore the inhabitants of day 1 creation, day 5 bears the inhabitants of day 2 creation, the waters below to be filled with sea creatures and the waters above to be filled with birds.
Day 3 focuses the ordering of space more narrowly toward the waters below, that area which we occupy, rather than the waters above, or the heavens. On day 3 we see a 2-fold origin sequence. From the waters below that have been separated from the heavens, comes forth 1) dry land out of the sea; from the dry land comes forth 2) seed-bearing plants and fruit-bearing trees. Day 6 repeats the pattern of the creation of inhabitants for the day 3 world as day 5 did for day 2. Day 6, like day 3, contains a two-fold creative process: God makes 1) the animals which come forth from the land and 2) humans. Unlike day 3 on which plants come forth from the land, there is no specific statement that humans came forth from animals on day 6. That would fit the creative pattern seen on day 3, and those of us who wrestle with trying to make scientific knowledge and faith congruent may see this as pointing toward an evolutionary process for the creation of humans. I don’t think that is a question that this narrative is concerned with. Perhaps a connection more likely than animals from humans would be between trees and humans as the final acts of creation on days 3 and 6, which is another path of contemplation that could be related to nutrition as well. Either way, as 21st century scientifically minded people, we need to be cautious of the presuppositions we bring to the text, the notions of what questions we think the Bible should answer for us, rather than letting it speak to us on its terms in its context.
At this point we can see the pairings of creation days: days 1 and 4 (light/dark and the inhabitants of both domains), days 2 and 5 (waters above and below, and the inhabitants of both domains), and days 3 and 6 (land bursting with green vegetation, and the land’s inhabitants). I was certainly never taught this growing up in an American church environment, which is disappointing to me now that the story of Genesis 1, reading the patterns in this way, has a suddenly new significance for me that is so much more beautiful and purposeful in describing our world and the functionality of it! Understanding these patterns has brought to light a new concept of the order of the creative process, one that is more nuanced and dense in imagery than I could have imagined.
I wonder if part of missing these patterns has to do with the contemporary way we learn and interpret our world. As I stated earlier, as moderns we look for literal, black and white sequential events or points in time from which to tell our stories, whether it is creative fiction (though the magical realists may differ on this one), guides for assembling Ikea furniture (that seems a pretty practical reason for such story-telling), or the origins of our place in the universe. Genesis 1 refuses to comply with this world-view. How can green plants thrive on dry land before the arrival of the sun? But by reading Genesis on its terms, understanding the design patterns from which it originates, we find an incredible world of wisdom that can open our minds to the structure and purpose of the created world. This in turn may help us begin to comprehend the Order behind it all, the Order which resides in us as image-bearers, that which has established an ideal existence for all living things.
For further reading on these ideas
, The Lost World of Genesis One by John H. Walton is a great book that discusses this subject in more detail. It is very accessible for us nonscholars and challenges the approach many of us have taken to these ancient scriptures to provide a rich interpretation of the first book of the Bible.