The second day

1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven.  And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Now we're getting somewhere.  The "firmament" (whatever that may be) is in fact "Heaven" (whatever that may be).  So we've gotten to the creation of Heaven.  But hold on, wasn't that created way back in the first verse?  "God created the heaven and the earth."  Barring a subtle distinction between "Heaven" and "the heaven", we've got a problem.

God created heaven, and then two days later created heaven.  We have a few options for resolving this:
1. God actually created heaven twice.  Not very satisfying.
2. Whoever wrote this wasn't capable of being coherent for eight verses.  Also not very satisfying.
3. Despite all of the hints I've discussed, this story isn't progressing serially.  Let's go with that one.

Looking back, we can completely reinterpret the first few verses.  The first verse could be an overview: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."  And then it goes into detail: "The way that happened was this.  Before God did his creating, the earth was formless, empty, dark, watery.  The Spirit of God was out for a swim, when God grew bored with the darkness and decided to create some light."

A quick point before I go into this interpretation in any more detail.  If this is the correct interpretation, the first few of sentences are terribly unclear or misleading.  Until you hit the 8th verse, you have a much more straightforward interpretation to go with.  So, we have strong evidence here that the document is badly written.

This interpretation makes the first verse much less impressive, frankly.  If the earth and water and darkness and God were all already around, "In the beginning" doesn't sound like "In The Beginning Of Time" so much as it sounds like "Our story begins one evening".  "God created the heaven and the earth" doesn't sound like "Wham!  God made heaven and earth from nothing."  Instead, it now reads more like, "I'm going to tell you the tedious process by which God with great difficulty succeeded in creating heaven and earth."  In fact, since the earth was already around, God didn't even really create it at all, so much as he shaped it from existing materials, made it go from unformed to formed, empty to full.  So, this makes God sound less like the magical all-powerful Creator the more straightforward interpretation of the first verse suggests, and more like a talented sculptor or builder.

This is in keeping with the impressions of God we got from later verses: pretty much human-like, maybe even a committee.  It also suggests that perhaps there were more details to the magic-sounding parts that have been omitted for brevity.  "God said, Let there be light.  And he dug in the earth until he found a methane source, and then he found a couple of pieces of flint, and there was light."  So the impressiveness of God drops way off.

Ok, let's get back to verse 8.  God gives a name to Heaven, as he did to Day and Night.

And this was the second day.  That's particularly odd, given that we now associate day and night with the rotation of the earth, which doesn't necessarily seem to be the case here; all we apparently have is light separated from darkness; why the cycling between Day and Night?  The first day we could understand as the creation of light after endless darkness, but what led to the second evening and morning?

And we're not much closer to understanding what is meant by "heaven" yet, although we now know that it's a firmament.