December 22, 1992

The "freeing" of the Dead Sea Scrolls a year ago from the restrictive control of a few scholars has unleashed a storm of controversy among the warring factions of biblical researchers. As more scholars have access to the ancient texts, they are challenging some of the reigning assumptions about who wrote them, when and how they fit into the volatile history of Judaism from about 250 B.C. to A.D. 70. "Everything about the scrolls is being re-examined and rethought," Dr. Michael Wise, a scrolls scholar at the University of Chicago, said in an interview last week at a conference on the manuscripts in New York.

Ordered by Lebanese soldiers to leave their makeshift tent camp, 415 exiled Palestinians in southern Lebanon tried to march back into Israeli-controlled territory today but were stopped when Israel's client militia fired mortars and machine-gun rounds at them. The shooting seemed intended more to frighten off the Palestinians than to hurt them, and it worked, because they headed back to their camp. Nonetheless, two men were reportedly wounded, one in the hand and one in the jaw, by a piece of shrapnel.

Stella Adler, the acting teacher who was a leading Method exponent, died at 91. Nathan Milstein, the violin virtuoso, was 88. Obituaries, page B10. (Photos)

THE work of evolution is usually done on a time scale of millennia, too protracted for scientists to witness. So biologists were surprised by a finding that a bird known as the blackcap had evolved an entirely new migration pathway in a mere 40 years, right under the watchful binoculars of Europe's devoted bird enthusiasts. The blackcap, a European wood warbler and relative of American gnatcatchers and kinglets, appears to have developed the genetic program for an entirely new migration route that shuttles it each winter from Central Europe to England rather than to the warmer climes normally sought by these birds in the western Mediterranean.

When Jonathan and Debby Gullery were married 10 years ago, in a mass wedding of 2,075 couples at Madison Square Garden, they were widely viewed as bit players in a bizarre show produced by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Strangers screamed at them as they sold flowers on the street, and Mrs. Gullery's father said he thought seriously about having her kidnapped and brought home. But over the last decade, the Gullerys say, both they and their church have grown up and settled down. On a recent evening, amid the chaos of bedtime for their three young children, they took turns coaxing the 4-year-old back to her room while Mrs. Gullery's father, who was visiting from Vermont, took refuge in the novel he was reading in the living room of their suburban home.