The gods were many and yet but one. Though plural they were singular. The subjects of impersonal verbs, they represented the pronoun in such expressions as: it rains; it thunders. "It" was Elohim. Already among nomad Semites monotheism had begun. Yet with this distinction. Each tribe had separate sets of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged. Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any humiliation to the family that they had in charge humiliated them. It made them angry, therefore vindictive, consequently unjust. It may be that they were not very ethical. Perhaps the bedouins were not either. Man fashions his god in proportion to his intelligence. That of the nomad was slender. He lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for mythological invention. The defect was due to his speech, which did not lend itself to the deification of epithets. Even had it done so, it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from place to place could not be cumbered with idols. The Elohim were, therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed. On the other hand, given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been the same. Mythology is the mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of art. Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown god. Had it been known and a fetish, they could not have become the practical people that they are. Even then they were shrewd. Their Elohim might alarm but never delude. Israel was uncheatable even in dream. Originally emigrants from Arabia, the nomads reached Syria, some directly, others circuitously, by way of Padan-Aram and across the Euphrates, whence perhaps their name of _Ibrim_ or Hebrews--_Those from beyond_. In the journey Babel and Ur must have detained. These cities, with their culture relatively deep and their observatories equally high, became, in after days, a source of legend, of wonder, of hatred, perhaps of revelation as well. At the time the nomads had no cosmogony or theories. The Chaldeans had both. There was a story of creation, another of antediluvian kings and of the punishment that overtook them. There was also a story of an emir of Ur, an old man who had benevolently killed an animal instead of his son. The story, like the others, must have impressed. In after years the old man became Abraham, a great person, who had conversed with the Elohim and whose descendants they were.