I don’t think what they were picturing is relevant. God had to give this description to Adam who retold the story.
My interpretation is different than a parable because it’s literal and I don’t see another way to make sense of the text scientifically - I could never tell what “formless and void” meant before. But feel free to give me another one that actually makes sense scientifically - what have you pictured them to mean?
Darned if I know. I think I came up with it after I read Flatland or maybe it just made sense then. I don’t remember the order. lol, tonight I started watching a video about what the Planck length is and I better figure out what the Planck constant is too - I need to go to bed so my brain is too fried to figure it out. I’ve just heard it explained as the smallest length. I figure the smallest thing only has 1 dimension because we cannot measure its width so…that works.
As I explained above, it’s 1-dimensional only because we can’t measure its width.
“Waters” is what the text says - I’m trying to figure out what the waters are - see my other thread (no one’s responded yet). Biblical Cosmography -> Primordial Waters = Fluid Dark Matter? - #2 by thoughtful
We only think of matter as 3D, but in my picture, matter is 1D because it can only be measured in 1 direction and that’s why it still be can be waters. I realized after I wrote this, people will object that a circle is 2D, but that’s the best way to understand it - and I think that gravity would form it into a circle. Sort of funny after I wrote my previous comments I was watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI57XIZ17hE and I was like - wait, my picture is sort of a protoplanetary disk. I’ll take it 
Too tired to know if I’m making sense. I’ll edit this tomorrow.