and as for you, you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall tear down their altars.’ But you have not obeyed Me; what is this you have done?

Then Gideon said to God, “Do not let Your anger burn against me that I may speak once more; please let me make a test once more with the fleece, let it now be dry only on the fleece, and let there be dew on all the ground.”

Now there was a man of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Micah.

He then returned the eleven hundred pieces of silver to his mother, and his mother said, “I wholly dedicate the silver from my hand to the Lord for my son to make a graven image and a molten image; now therefore, I will return them to you.”

So when he returned the silver to his mother, his mother took two hundred pieces of silver and gave them to the silversmith who made them into a graven image and a molten image, and they were in the house of Micah.

And the man Micah had a shrine and he made an ephod and household idols and consecrated one of his sons, that he might become his priest.

Then the man departed from the city, from Bethlehem in Judah, to stay wherever he might find a place; and as he made his journey, he came to the hill country of Ephraim to the house of Micah.

Micah said to him, “Where do you come from?” And he said to him, “I am a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, and I am going to stay wherever I may find a place.”

Micah then said to him, “Dwell with me and be a father and a priest to me, and I will give you ten pieces of silver a year, a suit of clothes, and your maintenance.” So the Levite went in.

So Micah consecrated the Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in the house of Micah.

Then Micah said, “Now I know that the Lord will prosper me, seeing I have a Levite as priest.”

So the sons of Dan sent from their family five men out of their whole number, valiant men from Zorah and Eshtaol, to spy out the land and to search it; and they said to them, “Go, search the land.” And they came to the hill country of Ephraim, to the house of Micah, and lodged there.

When they were near the house of Micah, they recognized the voice of the young man, the Levite; and they turned aside there and said to him, “Who brought you here? And what are you doing in this place? And what do you have here?”

He said to them, “Thus and so has Micah done to me, and he has hired me and I have become his priest.”

They passed from there to the hill country of Ephraim and came to the house of Micah.

They turned aside there and came to the house of the young man, the Levite, to the house of Micah, and asked him of his welfare.

When these went into Micah’s house and took the graven image, the ephod and household idols and the molten image, the priest said to them, “What are you doing?”

When they had gone some distance from the house of Micah, the men who were in the houses near Micah’s house assembled and overtook the sons of Dan.

They cried to the sons of Dan, who turned around and said to Micah, “What is the matter with you, that you have assembled together?”

So the sons of Dan went on their way; and when Micah saw that they were too strong for him, he turned and went back to his house.

Then they took what Micah had made and the priest who had belonged to him, and came to Laish, to a people quiet and secure, and struck them with the edge of the sword; and they burned the city with fire.

So they set up for themselves Micah’s graven image which he had made, all the time that the house of God was at Shiloh.

Now the appointed sign between the men of Israel and the men in ambush was that they would make a great cloud of smoke rise from the city.