The tribe of Dan lost the coastal land the lot gave it, stole a household's gods and priest, and burned the town of Laish to take a new inheritance

The Book of Joshua says the seventh lot gave the tribe of Dan a territory running from Zorah and Eshtaol to Ekron and "the border near Joppa." Then, it says, "the territory of the Danites slipped from their grasp." Judges 1 says the Amorites pressed the Danites into the hill country. The Song of Deborah asks, "Dan, why did he linger by the ships?" Judges 18 says that to that day "no territory had fallen to their lot." Five Danite spies found Laish, a quiet town far from Sidon with no one to defend it. On the way they stayed at the house of Micah in Ephraim, who kept a carved image, a cast image, an ephod and household idols, and a hired young Levite as priest. Six hundred armed Danites came back, took the images and offered the Levite a tribe instead of one household. He went gladly. Micah chased them and said, "You have taken my priest and the gods that I made... What do I have left?" The Danites killed the people of Laish, burned the town, rebuilt it and named it Dan. The priest's line, from Jonathan son of Gershom, served there until the exile; a raised letter in the Hebrew turns "Moses" into "Manasseh." In the 1960s Michael Astour and Yigael Yadin proposed that the Danites came from the Aegean. David Ilan's excavations at Tel Dan found Aegean-style storage jars in houses of the 12th to 11th centuries BC.