1. till that day no estate had fallen to it in the midst of the tribes of Israel. This formulation gives the impression that no tribal territory was assigned to the Danites. The actual case was that they were not able to hold their own against their Philistine neighbors and the local Canaanites and so were driven to migrate. The Philistine pressure on Dan is evident in the Samson narrative, which immediately precedes this story.

3. they recognized the voice of the Levite lad. Given his itinerancy, they may have actually run across him somewhere else in the south. Others conjecture that they detect a Judahite accent.

4. Thus and so has Micah done for me. This summarizing formula, which one would not find in novelistic dialogue, is occasionally introduced into biblical dialogue. “Thus and so” obviously refers to the Levite’s appointment as priest with the annual stipend.

5. Inquire, pray, of God. This idiom indicates inquiry of an oracle; the probable instrument would have been the ephod.

6. before the LORD is your way on which you go. Though the burden of this clause is that God will favor their endeavor, the formulation is a bit vague and even ambiguous: like oracles everywhere, the Levite is hedging his bets.

7. dwelling secure in the manner of the Sidonians. The inhabitants of the Phoenician city of Sidon, to the north on the Mediterranean coast, were evidently thought to live relatively free of fear from foreign attacks.

they were far off from the Sidonians, nor did they have any dealings with other people. Although the gist of these two clauses is that Laish was isolated and had no allies on which to rely, the wording—especially of the second clause—is somewhat obscure.

10. a people that dwells secure. As the use of this phrase in verse 7 makes clear, the gist is that this people lives in a sense of security, not suspecting that they will be attacked.

11. six hundred men. As the recurrence of this number in military contexts in the Book of Samuel suggests, this is the fixed size of a combat unit, something like a battalion.

14. these houses. From the plural, one infers that Micah’s house was part of a small compound.

And now, know what you should do. Anticipating the conquest of Laish, they want to acquire the paraphernalia to set up a cult there after they take the town.

16. the six hundred men . . . stationed themselves at the entrance of the gate. The five spies, whom the Levite already knows, are sent in to parlay with him, while the armed enforcers wait at the gate.

17. took the statue and the ephod and the teraphim and the molten image. They immediately seize the cultic objects, not asking the Levite, who is in no position to resist.

18. And the former group. The Hebrew says merely “and these,” but it has to refer to the five spies in contradistinction to the six hundred men.

19. Put your hand over your mouth and go with us and be father and priest for us. They follow an implied threat—shut up, if you know what is good for you—with the inducement of an offered position.

20. And the priest was pleased. Nobody in this story, beginning with Micah and his mother, has noble motives. The Levite immediately recognizes that this new position, priest for a tribe, is a considerable advancement, no doubt with a larger salary, and so he happily colludes in the theft of the cultic articles.

21. they put before them the little ones and the cattle and the heavy goods. Only now do we learn that the six hundred warriors are not just a raiding party but the first wave of a tribal migration, having brought with them their children (and presumably their wives) and their possessions. They put all these in front of them because the attack they anticipate would come from the rear, from a pursuing party of Micah and his men.

24. My god that I made. His language here, in keeping with “statue” and “molten image,” is frankly pagan. No one in this story appears to be a serious monotheist. Even though the narrative was composed late (see the comment on verse 30), the whole bizarre story appears to be an authentic reflection of an early moment in premonotheistic Israelite history when the exclusive worship of YHWH was not generally established.

25. embittered men. This is their condition because they have been displaced from their tribal territory and are for the moment homeless.

26. Micah saw that they were stronger than he. The story plays out through force. Micah can scarcely contend with six hundred heavily armed ruthless men who have just threatened to kill him and his whole household, and so he has to let them keep the precious objects they have stolen from him, which he had fashioned with silver he originally stole from his mother.

27. they struck them down with the sword. No moral considerations are involved. These people have attractive land; Dan needs land; the Danites slaughter the inhabitants of Laish and build their own town there.

29. like the name. The Masoretic Text reads “in the name,” but many Hebrew manuscripts show the standard idiom “like the name.”

who was born to Israel. The reference is to Jacob, not to the nation.

30. Jonathan son of Gershom son of Moses. At the very end, we are given the name and genealogy of the Levite. The Masoretic Text inserts a superscript nun in Moshe, Moses, turning it into Menashe, Manasseh, but this can’t be right because Gershom was the son of Moses and Manasseh is not a priestly tribe. Rashi aptly explains the orthographic oddity: “Out of respect for Moses, a nun is inscribed in order to change the name.” The genealogy marks a steep decline: Moses’s own grandson is a base sacerdotal mercenary, officiating in a cult that is at the very least semipagan. Placing the Levite just two generations after Moses would mean that the whole story is supposed to take place very early, at the beginning of the twelfth century B.C.E., a temporal location that has the inconvenient consequence of putting the Danite migration before the time of Samson, a Danite living in the south near the Philistines.

till the day the land went into exile. The reference is to the exile of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E., which means that the story, at least in its final formulation, had to be composed after that date, unless this final notation is a later editorial addition.

31. all the days that the house of God was in Shiloh. The anomalous introduction of this reference to the Shiloh sanctuary at the very end of the story is in all likelihood, as Yair Zakovitch has argued, an editorial move to link the material here with the beginning of the Book of Samuel, where Shiloh plays a central role.