The meaning of 'bara'

I've come across this interesting paper on the meaning of the Hebrew word 'bara', which is often translated as 'created' in the Genesis 1 creation account.

The word is used selectively:

v1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

v21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

v27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Its interesting to ponder on why these aspects were selected for bara creation. Traditional lexical entries for the word have defined it as meaning 'to create or form' but this paper suggests that it is better rendered as 'to separate'. Van Wolde describes it as being:

... a temporal process in which God moves the objects along a path, at the beginning of which they are not distin- guished and proximate, and at the end of which they are spatially distant and kept separate

This difference is a significant one. I don't think it would be in keeping with the context of this chapter to force the meaning of the words to fit the physical creation processes (this approach nearly always ends up going wrong somewhere along the line), but rather to think about what spiritual messages this is giving us....

P.S A number of scholars and commentators disagree with this thesis. See here, for example.