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Document number: 9970
Date: 10 Apr 1873
Recipient: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Author: RODWELL John Medows
Collection: British Library, London, Manuscripts - Fox Talbot Collection
Collection number: Acc 22677 [envelope only]
Last updated: 19th April 2012

Douglas House.
Highbury New Park. N.
Ap. 10. 1873

My dear Sir/

May I ask the favor of your accepting a Copy of my Translations of the B. of Job – wh Mess. William & Norgate will forward by to days post. I am conscious of more than one mistake in it – what – in a third Edition I hope to rectify.

I have now fought my way thro’ Tiglath Pileser – of course with the quadruple Translation of 1860 at my side – but some uncertainty – to me at least – seems to hang over several passages. Is it too much to hope that you, or some other competent Assyriologist will take up the work which Norris [illegible] 12 ys left unfinished, and help enquirers like myself, with that most necessary tool, a Dictionary complete?

The silence of Moses upon the immortality of the soul, of which he must as a resident in Egypt have been fully aware, is a very grave matter. It has sometimes struck me that the best way of accounting for that silence is by supposing that it is more apparent than real – and that it was intended to be inferred as our Lord seems to have inferred it where he says – God is not the God therefore of the Dead but of the Living – and as perhaps the Phaerices and forefathers inferred it.

Rationalists & Theologians can of course account for this reticence, by supposing that the Books of Moses &c were not written by him at all, and that this composition took place at varying periods under the Kings down to the time of [illegible deletion] the Captivities. In that case the clearer vision of a future state & spiritual world wh appears so clearly in the Prophets might be accounted for from Babylonian contact – and it might be said that if the Doctrine does not appear in the so called Mosaics & earlier Historical Books, it is because they were a compilation or condemnation of pre existing documents with sole reference to the History, Politics, & external Retreat of the Race.

Of course I think all this very wild – but the point is one wh requires a more thorough sifting than it has ever yet received.

I am my dear Sir faithfy your’s
J. M. Rodwell

[envelope:]
H. Fox Talbot Esq
Lacock Abbey
Chippenham

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