I was with you until the "myth" part.
I, too, was brought up with a YEC viewpoint. Which is based on how Gen 1:2 has been translated. In my late teens, I heard about the "GAP theory", that there is an unknown time gap between v.1 and 2. All of which would account for what science claims is a very old earth. However, I wasn't given any actual evidence for this, other than what was said.
Many years later, I discovered one of the most valuable verses in the Bible regarding how to study. Acts 17:11 - Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
So, I began applying this verse to what pastors/teachers/etc were saying. iow, does the Bible say what people claim?
At some point, I thought about Genesis 1:1,2. I met a Greek and Hebrew expert, whose church Bible is in Hebrew for the OT and Greek for the NT! He pointed me to biblehub.com as a resource for studying how Greek/Hebrew words are used in every other place in the OT or NT. When I studied the key words in v.2, I realized that the translators didn't translate those words the same way they did the rest of the OT. When seeing how these key words were translated in the rest of the OT, a different meaning began to develop.
Finally, every English translation begins v.2 with "and". The Hebrew has 1 word that can mean either "and" or "but", unlike the Greek and English. The Septuagint translates the conjunction as "but".
So, here is the traditional translation:
And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And this is how the key words should be translated:
But the earth became an uninhabitable wasteland; (I didn't examine the rest of the verse).
What is interesting is comparing this translation with what Isa 45:18 says:
For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!): "I am the LORD, and there is no other.
Now, the blue words in the traditional verse is "tohu wabohu" and contradicts Isa 45:18, which says God did NOT create the earth 'empty', which is the same word in Gen 1:2.
So, either God did or did not create the earth "tohu". Using the corrected translation, developed from how the key words are translated elsewhere in the OT, there is no contradiction.
What we have is that God didn't create the earth a wasteland (Isa 45:18) BUT the earth BECAME a wasteland.
All that said, Genesis 1:2ff is about a restoration of God's original creation. So the earth can be every bit as old as science has measured, without any "damage" to the biblical text.
So I don't see any "myth" about Gen 1. Just a straightforward account of original creation (Gen 1:1) and the earth becoming a wasteland (without any explanation) and God restoring earth and putting man on it.
I mentioned in this post to others that “myth” is understood as fairytale today, but in ancient times it wasn’t. Myth was a way of communicating to others certain things. Parables are similar in that they communicated a story that pointed to real people, not necessarily real virgins or farmers or slaves. The Israelites creation story in Genesis 1 to the story of Abraham provided meaning and purpose to the Israelites existence in the world. The creation account, although different in many ways was nearly identical to the creation stories of other nations around them, in their past and in their present. Myth wasn’t used then to explain fairytale, but things they believed and helped to explain their relationship to God and the world.
Understanding now how I understand myth and how I am using it is important. If what I’m saying is correct about myth, is this something you could agree with?
