Saturday, November 29, 2008

TWICE USED SONGS by Terry Giles and William J. Doan is profiled by Dana Massing GoErie.com:
Authors explore use of songs in Hebrew Bible

BY DANA MASSING
dana.massing@timesnews.com [more details]

Published: November 29. 2008 12:01AM

Why do we sing the national anthem before a baseball game?

For the same reason writers worked songs into the prose of the Hebrew Bible, says one of the authors of a new book.

"To create community solidarity," Terry Giles said.

Giles, a Gannon University professor, and William J. Doan, a former Gannon professor now at Pennsylvania State University, have written "Twice Used Songs: Performance Criticism of the Songs of Ancient Israel."

In it, the authors use performance criticism to understand why biblical writers put songs in their stories.

The songs that Doan and Giles write about are considered "twice-used" because their first appearance wasn't in the Scriptures known to Christians as the Old Testament.

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