"Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars — the first day even without a sky? And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood, so that anyone eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledge of good and evil? No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it."
— Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 – c. 253)

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04124.htm

>>17889152
>>17889200
Origen and likely many early Christians believed the scriptures contained oddities and incongruities like this specifically to convince the reader that a deeper meaning was intended than the literal, so 2 Peter may have derived his idea from Genesis under that assumption (or, if not him, then someone else who he got the idea from), that the incongruity in the Genesis account, with God apparently lying, indicated that the story was intended to be taken non-literally. Paul more openly reads very non-literal interpretations into scripture, like in Galatians 4:24, where Paul straight up says that the story of Abraham having children by one free woman and one enslaved woman is an allegory.

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.vi.v.v.i.html
(picrel source)

Interestingly, elsewhere in 2 Peter, there's a verse commonly used to oppose reading secret messages into scripture, 2 Peter 1:20, translated by the KJV to say "no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation" though by a footnote in the NRSV it could be understood to instead say that "no prophecy of scripture is a matter of the prophet's interpretation." which has a decidedly different meaning. Like, "Screw whatever the writer probably thought they were saying, we have to understand what the Holy Spirit was implying through it." Very death of the (human) author. But then 2 Peter seems to be strongly opposed to that type of thinking with regard to the gospels and Paul's letters, so the KJV translation does seem more congruous on the whole.