I have been assuming you are well informed on C-14 dating. But for what it's worth it is worth noting the following:Secret Alias wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2022 9:16 pm What is the explanation for a copy of this Alexandrian invention in the Judean desert about 25 years after it was first composed. Just trying to put this all together. 'The Teacher of Righteousness' should be identified with Onias III and 'the Wicked priest' Menelaus. So what's that? Beginning of the second century? A century or so after the texts were invented in Alexandria? So in that century you have (a) a Samaritan cultus at Gerizim (b) Jewish sacrifice at Jerusalem and (c) a sectarian movement that moved into the desert with a near autograph copy of an Alexandrian Torah. Is there even a generation of peace where ecumenism existed in the Levant or where they at each others throats from the get go?
From page 70 of The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Davies, Brooke, Callaway:
And from page 74 of the same:While Cross’s typology is excellent, it does not automatically yield chronology. The margin in dating needs to be at least 25 years in each direction (the lifetime of a scribe). Recent Carbon-14 (AMS) datings, claimed to support Cross’s datings, actually do not support the precision he claims, though this method of dating is not sufficiently close to determine the matter.
No-one can say that a scroll can be dated 250 to ca 248 BCE. Such precision is impossible -- even with the "about" qualifier.Recent Carbon-14 testing (more precisely referred to as Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) of the parchment of a selection of Dead Sea Scrolls has been interpreted as confirming accepted palaeographical datings. This is largely true in broad terms. But AMS cannot date these materials within a 50-year range, much less in terms of quarter centuries and thirds of centuries, or even to a specific year such as ‘c. 50 bce’, as is sometimes done on the basis of palaeography. The practitioners of C-14 (AMS) science speak of a range based on probability. For example, with a 68 per cent probability a specific parchment can typically be dated to within about a century. If the probability is raised to 95 per cent the range exceeds a century. Moreover, there remains a possibility of a rare ‘rogue’ result, such as in cases where the material has been contaminated. Again, it must be remembered that C-14 (AMS) dates the material, not the text. In most cases we can assume that the scroll was inscribed soon after the animals that provided the skin were killed. But that may not always be so. Finally, of the thousands of Qumran fragments, only a relatively small number of samples have been analyzed in different laboratories. Though Carbon-14 analysis has certainly been refined in recent years, it is unlikely ever to be able to give us dates as precise as we would like for any scrolls as ancient as these. It can certainly confirm (barring the occasional erratic result) the verdict of palaeography in general, though not the very precise palaeographical dates sometimes cited.
The above leaves open the possibility that the Exod-Lev skin you are referring to was prepared within a generation of the Alexandria translation and written on in the next.
But what if it could be established that a significant amount of material had a very high probability of being written within just a few years of the traditional LXX translation? Here are my own thoughts, not those of Russell Gmirkin:
It would mean that RG's explanatory model of where and when the creation and Greek translations of the Pentateuch occurred would potentially (not necessarily) be open to revision. What would not be touched at all by such a find would be the hypothesis itself: the evidence presented for the Greek influence on the content and style of the Pentateuch. The evidence presented there is very strong. In my own view, it would mean that the story of the scribes being invited to Alexandria ca 273 bce and that event being the occasion of the creation of the biblical works would be open to revision. I have less confidence in that event as the explanatory model for the hypothesis of Greek influence than Gmirkin appears to have. But at present it does seem to be the most likely explanation and C-14 dating of one DSS item does not impinge on that in the slightest -- for the reasons quoted above.