Judges 18:3
When they were by the house of Micah, they knew the voice of the young man the Levite: and they turned in thither, and said unto him, Who brought thee hither? and what makest thou in this place? and what hast thou here? When they were by the house of Micah, they knew the voice of the young man the Levite: and they turned in thither, and said unto him, Who brought thee hither? and what makest thou in this place? and what hast thou here?
Judges 18:3 belongs to Judges 17-21, the book's two closing episodes outside the stories of the judges. The real story of the book ends with chapter 16, while these chapters record events that occurred in the early part of the history of the judges. On their journey to find an inheritance the Danites stayed by the house of Micah, knew the voice of the young man the Levite, and turned in to ask who brought him there, what he was doing in that place, and what he had there. Their questions revealed that he was living there in Micah's service, holding the position of priest. The encounter led them to take the priest and Micah's household idols to Laish, destroy the city, rename it Dan, and establish a sanctuary and idolatrous worship there that continued until the captivity of the ten tribes.
The passage belongs to Israel's troubled period under the judges, when the nation faced unsatisfactory leadership and repeated hardship. Together with chapter 19, the chapter shows the severe immorality prevailing in Israel at the time when people did what seemed right to themselves. It illustrates how conscience and human reason without God's revealed standard become distorted, so that wrong appears right and right appears wrong. The backsliding it shows cannot be done with impunity, and those God used for the deliverance of His people are not set before us as examples to follow, since God takes the very best material at His hand though sometimes very crude and rough as in the case of Samson. The incident was the tribe of Dan's first apostasy, suggested as the reason Dan was omitted from the tribes numbered in the sealing vision of Revelation 7, and this earlier idolatrous worship at Dan made it easier for Jeroboam later to establish calf worship there.