This source gives a lot of details on the literary origin of the Pentateuch beginning a little earlier in the North to the 7th century BCE where the Ugarit libraries are found. This is a little long Inope itt posts. It details the times the Pentateuch was compiled.
This essay deals with the archaeological and extrabiblical clues that are relevant for identifying the historical realities that may lay behind pentateuchal texts. It will concentrate on the most thoroughly discussed pentateuchal narrative complexes,
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Ajrud (for the latter see recently Ahituv, Eshel, and Meshel 2012). Therefore the early phase of the Iron IIB in the first half of the eighth century seems to be the earliest possible period in which we might expect to see the compilation of those northern literary texts that found their way into the Pentateuch and other biblical works. In Judah, the main expansion of scribal activity and literacy occurred in the seventh century BCE Most corpora of ostraca—Arad, Lachish, Uza, Malhata, Kadesh-rnea—belong to this period (see e.g. Ahituv 2008; for details see Finkelstein 2020). Most significantly, the spread of literacy is also attested in the proliferation of seals, seal impressions, and bullae. It is noteworthy that the many bullae from the area of the Gihon Spring in Jerusalem, dated slightly earlier, to c .800 BCE, are not inscribed (Reich, Shukron and Lernau 2007). The seventh century BCE
is, therefore, the moment when Judah becomes a “writing society,” beyond the Jerusalemite circles of temple and palace. This was probably an outcome of the century (c .730–630 BCE) when Judah was dominated by Assyria and was incorporated into the sphere of Assyrian administration, global economy, and culture. New evidence for the scope of literacy in the closing years of the Iron Age has emerged from interdisciplinary research on digital methods for comparing handwriting in ostraca. York on sixteen Arad inscriptions has revealed a minimum of six authors (Faigenbaum-Golovin et al.
2016; more according to Shaus et al. 2020). The contents of the examined ostraca reveal that literacy had spread to the smallest forts in the Beer-Sheba Valley and all the way down the bureaucratic ladder to the second-in-command in the Arad storehouse. This kind of proliferation of scribal activity is unattested in the Babylonian and Persian periods when the southern highlands show almost no evidence of Hebrew inscriptions. In fact, beyond the possibility that the Ketef Hinnom silver plates ate from after 586 BCE (Na’aman 2011a), the only (meager) evidence comes from the few Yehud coins, which date to the fourth century BCE, and coins can hardly attest to genuine scribal activity.This means that (again, apart possibly from etef Hinnom) not a single inscription hasbeen found for the period between 586 and c 350 BCE; not an ostracon, not a seal, not a seal impression, not a bulla. This does not mean that the (p. 407)
knowledge of writing Hebrew disappeared, but the scribal activity must have declined—and significantly.
This should come as no surprise: the destruction of Judah brought about the collapse of the kingdom’s bureaucracy and the deportation of many of the educated intelligentsia, the literati. The reduced population in the remaining villages (see above) was hardly capable of producing a massive number of literary works. Of course, there must have been some continuity in the production of literary works in Yehud and early Judea; one can imagine, for instance, a secluded educated priestly group near the temple. Even so, however, activity on the Temple Mount appears to have remained limited, and one wonders why writing did not trickle into daily life (ostraca, bullae, etc.). As of today, then, the archaeological evidence seems to challenge the tendency to place the compilation of much biblical material in Yehud-Judea of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods. It seems to me safer to take a different, twofold approach: first, to try to date as much material as possible to periods in Judah/Judea that evince widespread scribal activity and literacy in all media and all forms of inscriptions—that is, the latest phase of the Iron Age and the Late Hellenistic period after c 200 BCE. The latter date raises a question: is it possible that material was added to the Pentateuch as late as the second century BCE? The answer seems to be positive for minor revisions (Finkelstein andRömer 2014a) but negative for major literary works. Second, for the Babylonian and Persian periods, it is advisable to place the compilation of as much material as possible in Babylonia (see e.g. Albertz 2003).
Bethel
The archaeology of Bethel is of considerable significance for the discussion here, because
some scholars see it as the place where many of the northern biblical texts were originally authored (e.g. Knauf 2006; Davies 2007). A study of the findings retrieved from this site(Finkelstein and Singer-Avitz 2009) indicated that the settlement history of Bethel was not continuous, as maintained by the excavators. Rather, it was characterized by settlement oscillations, with three phases of strong activity (in the Iron I, Iron IIB, and Hellenistic periods); two periods of decline (in the late Iron IIA and the Iron IIC); and two periods of probable abandonment (in the early Iron IIA and—most significantly—in the Babylonian and Persian periods). This evidence cannot be brushed aside as stemming from excavations of limited scope, as significant sectors of the small mound—larger than may appear at first glance—were excavated. These data are of crucial importance. They seem to reject the possibility of the transmission of northern texts to Yehud after 586. They strengthen the likelihood that the northern literary works were brought to Judah after 720 BCE, and that the intermingling of northern and southern texts in Jerusalem could have taken place as early as the seventh century BCE, as part of an effort to construct an identity for the mixed population of a “United” Judahite–Israelite monarchy within Judah.
