The trend in linguistic studies in the mid-to-late 20th century has been towards establishing dates of composition for an archaic layer of Biblical Hebrew attested in the Massoretic Text. The diachronic linguistic, historical and literary theories supporting this dating have resulted in a tiipartite typology of biblical texts that continues to have significant influence in contemporary biblical scholarship. I propose that (a) the linguistic typologies supporting this division are methodologically unsound and should be abandoned, and (b) specific forms of linguistic evidence can provide historical, chronological and literary implications.