OK,OK, Caaaaalmmm down. I respect you for slogging through it, apparently with the heart of an honest truth seeker, since you express frustration at not being able to make sense of it. Without the Holy Spirit's illumenation, none can. I will try to explain....
If you read on in to chapter two of Genesis, you realize that the text does not speak of the seventh day ending. There is no "and the evening and the morning were day seven". The implication is that the seventh day, where God has rested from His creative works, is still ongoing.
My main point here is that the Hebrew word "Yom" used for DAY is a very vague and broad word, much like our english word day. We can use the word for an age as in "the day of the dinosaurs". So did the Hebrews.
The phrase "morning to evening" means a 24 hour literal day, but the phrase "evening and the morning" often DOES NOT refer to a literal 24 hour day. In the book of DANIEL (8:26), he is told to seal up the book of the vision "of the evening and the morning". Many translations make this a plural, because it is clear that the vision refers to a period of several years at the end of the age, but it is singular in the original text.
Perhaps you make reference to an injunction to keep the Sabbath because God created the earth in six days and on the seventh He rested- don't want to use quotation marks because I am doing it from memory. Let me point out that the same thing is referred to when the Israelites are commanded to let the ground rest every seventh year. This is refered to as a Sabbath for the land I think, though it is not a literal 24 hour period. Only the 1 in 7 proportion is consistent. The times involved vary for men, the Earth, and the Creator.
When scripture is taken out of context, it loses its foundation in historical reality. ANY fact taken off the page of the writer, be he scientist or priest, loses its truth in some measure when just 60 or 70 years of context are removed... and with Genesis, we are talking about thousands of years of historical context.
By the late 1800's it had become fashionable to believe that the historical reality of the cities in MUCH of the old testament, were bogus... written by crazed religious mythologists to keep the sheep in line... and so stories about the cities and the happenings within their cultural context were poo pooed by "sctentific" researchers.
Nowadays, its not done. The Old Testament has proven itself time and again geographically and in the fields of cultural anthropology, where the questionable "oddities" of the late 1800's have been found to be pretty much, historical facts.
That some of the Bible is hard to understand for even scholars is admitted by almost everyone who is honest. I am convinced that when the rubber meets the road, the stories of old are substantially true... and completely true, when considered along side the cultural and historical context in which they were originally formulated.
YOUR points were well made. thanks.