How can there be light and plants before the sun? Genesis 1:3-19

The passages

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Genesis 1:3

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind.

Genesis 1:11

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Genesis 1:16

The problem

Day and night, with evening and morning, are counted from the first day. The sun, which the modern reader takes to be the source of daylight, is created on the fourth. Plants, which rely on sunlight, appear on the third. The stars, which in the sciences are older than the sun, are made after the earth and after plants.

What believers and scholars say

Another source of light. Some argue that God himself was the light before the sun, as Revelation 22:5 says of the new creation. This answers the plant question for a short period, but it leaves the strange order of the text.

The days are not in chronological order. A literary framework reading holds that days one to three describe the setting of boundaries (light, sky, land) and days four to six describe the filling of those boundaries (lights, birds and fish, land animals and people). On this reading, there is a parallel structure, and the fourth day answers the first.

Ancient cosmology. Walton and many scholars say that for an ancient reader, light and day were things given by a god and were not the same as the sun, which was considered a ruler or a lamp placed in the sky. The order is theological, and puts the sun and moon in the role of servants. The text is polemical against cultures that worshiped them.

Plain disagreement. For readers who take the days as literal and in sequence, the question has no scientific answer, and they treat it as a miracle.

Where this leaves it

Whether it is a problem depends on whether Genesis 1 was written to give the sequence of physical events. The structure of the chapter, with its repeated forms and its paired days, makes a sequence less likely. A reader who sees it as a literary and theological text will find an answer here. A reader who needs it to be literal will find a puzzle.