9. In the population of Chaldea the Semitic element was strongly represented. It is probable that tribes of Semites came into the country at intervals, in successive bands, and for a long time wandered unhindered with their flocks, then gradually amalgamated with the settlers they found in possession, and whose culture they adopted, or else formed separate settlements of their own, not even then, however, quite losing their pastoral habits. Thus the Hebrew tribe, when it left Ur under Terah and Abraham (see page 121), seems to have resumed its nomadic life with the greatest willingness and ease, after dwelling a long time in or near that popular city, the principal capital of Shumir, the then dominant South. Whether this tribe were driven out of Ur, as some will have it,[BJ] or left of their own accord, it is perhaps not too bold to conjecture that the causes of their departure were partly connected with religious motives. For, alone among the Chaldeans and all the surrounding nations, this handful of Semites had disentangled the conception of monotheism from the obscuring wealth of Chaldean mythology, and had grasped it firmly. At least their leaders and elders, the patriarchs, had arrived at the conviction that the One living God was He whom they called "the Lord," and they strove to inspire their people with the same faith, and to detach them from the mythical beliefs, the idolatrous practices which they had adopted from those among whom they lived, and to which they clung with the tenacity of spiritual blindness and long habit. The later Hebrews themselves kept a clear remembrance of their ancestors having been heathen polytheists, and their own historians, writing more than a thousand years after Abraham's times, distinctly state the fact. In a long exhortation to the assembled tribes of Israel, which they put in the mouth of Joshua, the successor of Moses, they make him say:--"Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood" (i.e., the Euphrates, or perhaps the Jordan) "in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nachor, _and they served other gods_." And further on: "... Put away _the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the flood_ and in Egypt, and serve ye the Lord.... Choose you this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell; as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." (Joshua, xxiv. 2, 14, 15.) What more probable than that the patriarchs, Terah and Abraham, should have led their people out of the midst of the Chaldeans, away from their great capital Ur, which held some of the oldest and most renowned Chaldean sanctuaries, and forth into the wilderness, partly with the object of removing them from corrupting associations. At all events that branch of the Hebrew tribe which remained in Mesopotamia with Nahor, Abraham's brother (see Gen. xxiv. xxix.