Well, we can theoretically arrive at a 3rd century B.C.E. archetype by using the conservative Masoretic Text (MT) as the default and comparing it with non-harmonistic variants in the Septuagint (LXX), Samaritan Pentateuch (SP), and Qumran fragments. But textual criticism offers little help in understanding what the text of the Torah looked like at an earlier stage, or how and when it was composed.I agree that textual criticism can, at best, only take us back to an edition of the Pentateuch from the late Persian or early Hellenistic periods. To get behind it we have to resort to source criticism, where the temptation is to atomize the text beyond the surviving evidence.
Incidentally, I edited 4QGenesish and 4QGenesisk in my doctoral dissertation and published them in DJD 12 (1994).
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