The Bible’s first war is also the first land-conquest and holy war.

Evidence

It is a remarkable war, not to say that it is the war, the true mother of all wars, the first war of the world, of the biblical world, at least, and thus the First World War. As I have said, it is not only the first war narrated by the Bible (where already “the entire state is under arms and is torn from its domestic life at home to fight abroad,” where “the war of defense turns into a war of conquest,” Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 211), it is also the first occasion for Abraham’s “conquest of the land” (”Abram conquiert la terre” is the title that the French translator, Andre Chouraqui, gives to this section). The first war is thus also a war for land, the war of Abraham for the land. It is the first holy war, the first Abrahamic explosion. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 318

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s interest in the historical roots of holy war as Western, connecting to earlier notes on the Western holy war tradition.