For lights

1:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

If you recall, the last verse ended in a colon.  So, let me summarize to better understand the first phrase.  "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven ... And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven ...".  In other words, God is explaining that he's creating lights, and that the purpose of those lights is to be lights.  In fact, this is apparently the sixth purpose, after the five listed in the previous verse.   "I'm making lights, and they're going to do all this stuff, and they're going to be lights."  It's just plain silly.

He does go on to say "to give light upon the earth".  That is, he views lights as I do, as a source of light.  And this light has not just a source, but a target; and that target is the earth.  It suggests that these lights aren't just supposed to shine any which way, but to shine earthwards.  This is clearly geocentric thinking.

This purpose for these lights makes the earlier creation of light even stranger; that light wasn't made to illuminate the earth, but just to illuminate God's workspace for the first few days until he got around to making lights.  Or something.

Of course, "and it was so" sounds like the end of it.  But, we've seen this phrase used redundantly before, so we shouldn't be surprised when the next couple of verses effective repeat it, albeit with elaboration.

Let me discuss something that continues to surprise me.  Most of us grew up with this story, to some degree or another.  We kind of knew it, we heard it in bits and pieces, we may even have read it.  And it seemed fine; dramatic and progressing forward, if a little heavy in lists.  God made this one day, and God made that the next, and in the end God made everything.  But when we actually read it carefully like this, think about it line for line, it borders on incoherent at times.  The purpose of the lights is to be lights?  Light was created three days before lights?  What is going on here? 

Not to mention that at times it sounds the way teenagers talk: "We thought maybe we'd go to the mall, so that we could, you know, be at the mall.  So we went.  And we got in a car and drove to the mall, and then we got to the mall.  And it was cool being at the mall.  That's where we went. to the mall."

There are probably lots of explanations for why it's as badly written as it is.  It was probably passed along orally without being written down for thousands of years, and mangled a bit along the way.  It probably predates people thinking seriously about how to tell stories, also by thousands of years. 

More interesting is why no one comments on how incoherent is.  It's not common to hear things like "The Bible reads like it was written by someone with attention deficit disorder."  There's some societal force at work, preventing basic criticisms, no matter how obvious they are.  There's also some issue about becoming familiarized with something since childhood, before we could reason clearly.  We've been brainwashed.