Life
The next stage is described as follows:
God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear"; and it was so. God called the dry land "earth", and the gathering together of the waters he called "seas". God saw that it was good.
God said, "Let the earth yield grass, herbs yielding seeds, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with their seeds in it, on the earth"; and it was so. The earth yielded grass, herbs yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, with their seeds in it, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.
So far, regarding the physical cosmos, we have matter and space. Now we come to biological life, the environment needed to support it, and the process by which it could replicate itself. Self-replicating life forms are what scientists tell us came first, and so does the insight of this wonderful myth. We could not have animal life as we know it without the flora coming first. Photosynthesis is the process by which plants produce oxygen, and this oxygen is vital to the whole range of animal life. Oxygen has to come first, hence flora before fauna, which would hardly be obvious in a pre-scientific mind.
Without necessarily implying that planet earth is the only place in the universe where life forms exist, we are now clearly focused on what happened on the planet we occupy.
In 21st century terms we have been told:
"The environment necessary for life came next, with land and water as the main components. All sorts of flora emerged on dry land, each with its own inbuilt system of self- replication."