It is always both amusing and perplexing when commentators claim,
against common knowledge of Hebrew poetic conventions, that Genesis 1 is
'poetry'; it is clearly not (see also Kugel's work and Barrick's review).
Most evidently, it is a delimited list,
more akin to a modern computer database
structure than anything else: it has repeated segments, we would call
them fields: each record has marker fields, end of record fields and a count
field surrounding the data field.
Nothing to do with poetry.
Indeed, it is much like the counted
list in Numbers 7, and nothing like symbolic language at all
