The narrator’s description of the Danites' striking Laish with the edge of the sword echoes the prologue, where the men of Judah struck
Jerusalem with the mouth of the sword
(Judges 1:8) as did the men of Joseph to Bethel (Judges 1:25). Those instances were connected with the Lord’s previous instructions to conquer the land. The irony is that this terminology is now connected with the Danites’ unauthorized conquest of a city well to the north of their allotted territory.1 This is a cold-blooded, unholy war that has nothing to do with the Lord. It is the final stage in their movement away from their inheritance and toward idolatry as the centre of their tribe’s existence.2
27 But the people of Dan took what Micah had made, and the priest who belonged to him, and they came to Laish, to a people quiet and unsuspecting, and struck them with the edge of the sword and burned the city with fire.