Endnote 7 – A Very Brief History of Old Hebrew Script
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.