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 yours
J. M. Rodwell
[envelope:]
H. Fox Talbot Esq
Lacock Abbey
Chippenham