ous 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.

The story of creation also impressed. It was enlightening and
comprehensible. The parallel theory of spontaneous generation and the
progressive evolution of the species which the magi entertained, they
probably never heard. Even otherwise it was too complex for minds as
yet untutored. The fables alone appealed. Mentally compressed into
portable shape, carried along, handed down, their origin afterward
forgotten, they became the traditions of a nation, which, eminently
conservative, preserved what it found, among other things the name,
perhaps inharmonious, of Jhvh.[31]

[Footnote 31: Renan: Histoire du peuple d'Israel. Kuenen: De Godsdienst
van Israel.]

That name, since found on an inscription of Sargon, appears to have
been the title of a local god of Sinai, whom the nomads may have
identified with Elohim, particularly, perhaps, since he presided over
thunder, the phenomenon that alarmed them most and which, in
consequence, inspired the greatest awe. That awe they put into the
name, the pronunciation of which, like the o