This chapter relates how the Danites, being overcrowed in their inheritance, sent out spies to search the land, and see if they could find any proper place to add unto it, and enlarge it, Jud 18:1 who returned and reported Laish as such, and encouraged the Danites to go and possess it; for which purpose they sent six hundred men up to it,Jud 18:7 and as they went, called at the house of Micah, and took away his priests and his gods, Jud 18:13 and having taken Laish, set up Micah's graven image there, Jud 18:28.
Ver. 1. In those days there was no king in Israel,.... No supreme magistrate, no judge, for it was before the time of the judges, after the death of Joshua and before Othniel the first judge; this is observed before, Jud 17:6 and here repeated to account for the evil things done by the Danites, their consulting Micah's oracle, taking away his priest and his gods, and setting up his graven image in Dan, by which means idolatry was spread in Israel, and brought on their servitude to Chushanrishathaim, from which Othniel the first judge was their deliverer:and in those days the tribe of the Danites sought them an inheritance to dwell in; that is, a family of them, as in the next verse, not the whole tribe; for as a family is sometimes put for a tribe, Jos 7:17 so a tribe for a family, Jud 20:12for unto that day [all their] inheritance had not fallen to them among the tribes of Israel: we rightly supply the words "all their"; for otherwise an inheritance had fallen to them by lot, as the other tribes.