Gen 1.14 says "lights" ... not light. Light was not created in Gen. 1.14 ... it was created in Gen 1.3 "Let there be light". Please read the text.
... but also explicitly recognizes (in the last clause) that the days could not be divided before then.
It says nothing of the sort ... read the text ...
4 God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light day, and the darkness He called night.
The text in Gen 1.4-5 explicitly claims that GOD did the separation of the days prior to Gen 1.14. God separated the light (day) and the darkness (night) in verse 4. It also states that the concept of a "day" was defined BEFORE the creation of the sun. Evening and morning ... evening and morning ... evening and morning ... then the sun ... evening and morning ... etc.
All that we can understand from the text of Gen. 1 is that God created light, HE separated the light (day) from the darkness (night), and that evening and morning marked the beginning and end of a day. Then after the sun was created, the SUN separated the day from the night.
So you have a progression like ...
Day 1 - God separated day/night
Day 2 - God separated day/night
Day 3 - God separated day/night
Day 4 - Sun created to separate day/night
Day 5 - Sun separated day/night
Day 6 - Sun separated day/night
Day 7 - Sun separated day/night
etc ...
When someone comes up with a foreign interpretation for a straightforward passage, I always wonder if there is an underlying theological problem the new interpretation is trying to solve.
Is it more of a stretch to believe that the word "yowm" possessed one of three accepted meanings and referred to an indeterminate block of time as corroborated by all physical evidence, or to believe that there was day and night before the sun (especially when both interpretations are equally consistent with the plain language)? Do you believe the Earth is 6000 years old?
You know, the whole existence of day and night comes from sitting on a planet that rotates. God’s not confined to a planet so Genesis is clearly written to reflect the POV of man - and its limited by what he could understand at the time.
Man couldn’t understand the planets traveling in elliptical orbits for billions years -this is before we knew what a ellipse was or how much a billion was or that the planet rotated at all.
Jesus spoke in parables to help people understand so I don’t think its odd that the old testament uses parables too.
Dwelling on the details of a grand parable risks missing the point.