A general rule for higher-critics

I suggest that higher-critics bias their "redaction!" conjectures as late as they can.

For instance: Psalm 45. Maybe it was used for Ahab and Jezebel. It follows that some copy existed during the marriage of Athaliah and Joash, their successors - because, hey, it's in the Bible we got (and in the Enochian library and in 4Q171). As a result we do not, strictly speaking, need 45 for Ahab; that's a conjecture behind.

Along similar lines: pesiqta. Maybe it's Maccabean. If so then it was copied later. If not we'll not lose anything if we look at the "copies" first and speculate upon its origins later.

For another instance: Psalm 78. Was it redacted by Hananiah for the Josiah party? That means that the earlier "version" no longer exists. Maybe the intertextual strain wasn't with Psalm *78 but with Psalms *78a and *78b. Like Psalm 151 in Greek.

One more: Deuteronomy. Josiah's court claimed they'd found it, or most of it. We might have that "original". But maybe... we might not. Deuteronomy's historical preamble refers to kings of nations as don't figure in the Book of Judges. Was this "Moses" a garbled read of the -mosis and -meses kings of Egypt? Hard to say. Harder to speculate, I'll say.