If a day in Genesis 1 could be a long period of time what requires you to assume that a reference to six days automatically means 6 literal 24 hours when you don’t require that in Genesis 1? All of these six day references you keep mentioning are talking about the commands that man is supposed to be keeping. As a command yes they refer to 24 hour days. When they refer to God they are not required to be a 24 hour day. When God created by just speaking why do you think that required a literal 24 hour day? Ex 20:8-11 and Ex 31:15-17 make perfect sense when you apply a 24 hour day to man and a God day to God. In fact I don’t think it makes sense to say that God required or used all of the daylight hours of a normal day to create what he created just by speaking. If this is not an indication of a figurative use of day what is?
What do you define as the beginning of the seventh day? The seventh day marked the cessation of the Lord’s initial creative actions. This seventh day was the day following the creation of man in God’s image. God’s creative work has been in progress for 4.543 billion years or six “days”. The beginning of the seventh day therefore was at most 50,000 (possibly 10,000) years ago. Does this not agree with the Biblical history? If you are not seeing this let me know.
Why would accepting that a day to the Lord is not necessarily a 24 hour day when there is Scripture to support that require mental contortions? Peter did say that With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. In fact when you consider that God created time and exists outside of time it makes no sense to try to force a period of time on anything that he does.