Why is it that before creation there was chaos?

Many very ancient religions held that creation came about because of, or involved, conflict between the forces of good and chaos. It appears that for the ancients, overcoming the forces of chaos was a more plausible way of explaining the origins of the world. The calm, considered decisions to create a world, as in the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, seem to reflect a later, more sophisticated development in theology.

The forces of chaos were sometimes seen as destructive gods, but in other cases as chaos monsters that had to be defeated by the gods, who were generally benevolent. In either case, the creation of the world is the result of the primordal chaos. An example of a chaos god is the Babylonian goddess, Tiamat, who is clearly conceived as a monstrous threat to both cosmic and socio-political order, and the survival of the world as well as the survival of the state depend on the creator god Marduk defeating her and keeping her from returning.

In a Hindu creation story, from the Sanskrit hymns in the Rig Veda, the creator god Indra must slay the chaos demon Vrtra in order to release its primordial chaos waters as a life source, thereby creating and establishing a livable cosmos, the order of which is integrally related to Vedic understanding of social order.

Even the early Israelites appear to have believed that the world was created out of chaos. The Bible contains ancient references to the forces of chaos associated with the world's creation. Timothy K. Beal (Religion and its Monsters) has identified a quite a few fragments of more ancient chaos stories in the biblical Book of Job. For example, in Job 38:8, God asks, "Who shut Yam behind doors when it burst forth from the womb ..." (KJV translates as: "shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?" The italics on 'as if' mean that this is not a literal translation. ).

Yam (or Yamm) was the Canaanite sea god, a destructive chaos force, and the reference in Job can be identified in early Canaanite creation stories. Behemoth and Leviathan, also mentioned in Job and in the Psalms, are also generally considered to have been chaos monsters in very early Hebrew belief.