What kings do

Continuing on through the Old Testament, Kings, Chronicles and whatnot, the Bible seems like an infinite cycle of successions and conquests, of rulers and people forgetting to worship the Lord and destroy hill-shrines to Baal, so destruction is visited upon them. It gets pretty routinized.

Here it is distilled to its quintessence, Chronicles 1:20 "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, Joab led out the armed forces. He laid waste the land of the Ammonites and went to Rabbah and besieged it, but David remained in Jerusalem. Joab attacked Rabbah and left it in ruins. David took the crown from the head of their king—its weight was found to be a talent of gold, and it was set with precious stones—and it was placed on David’s head. He took a great quantity of plunder from the city and brought out the people who were there, consigning them to labor with saws and with iron picks and axes. David did this to all the Ammonite towns. Then David and his entire army returned to Jerusalem." 

I had never really thought of it like that: spring comes, and it's time to go out a-conquerin' because that's just how the world was/is and that's what kings did: they went out and took land and slaves. Certainly that was the case in the Old Testament. It was perhaps rational in the absence of both technological progress and the improvements in unit productivity which aid economic growth and also a universalizing ethics-based moral framework which discouraged undifferentiated slaughter.

Probably Stephen Pinker is not wrong in his thesis from The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argues that a key metric of progress is the decreasing probability over time that males will die at the hands of other males, whether in war or just in crime/local violence. Ukraine notwithstanding, the post-WWII phase of history still looks pretty good.