The most optimistic estimations situate the earliest Old Hebrew Dead Sea scrolls in the fifth or fourth century B.C.E. See Salomo A. Birnbaum, The Hebrew Scripts (Leiden: Brill, 1971), col. 64–70; Michael Langlois, “Dead Sea Scrolls Paleography and the Samaritan Pentateuch,” in Michael Langlois, ed., The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Peeters: Leuven, 2019), pp. 255–285. The generally accepted earliest date is the third century B.C.E.
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