Charles Ellicott Commentary Judges 18:27

"And they took that which Micah had made, and the priest whom he had, and came unto Laish, unto a people quiet and secure, and smote them with the edge of the sword; and they burnt the city with fire." — Judges 18:27 (ASV)

Burnt the city with fire. —This was unusual, for we are told that Hazor was the only city which Joshua burnt (Joshua 11:13). Perhaps they had devoted the city by a ban, as Jericho was devoted (Joshua 6:24); or the burning may have been due to policy or to accident.

Probably, the notion that such conduct was cruel and unjustifiable never occurred to them; nor must we judge them by the standard of Christian times. But Dan was no gainer. His name disappears from the records of 1 Chronicles 4:1, and he is not mentioned among the elected tribes in Revelation 7:0.

Blunt (Undesigned Coincidences, part 2, 4) conjectures, from 2 Chronicles 2:14, that the cause of their disappearance from Israelite records—the latest mention of them as a tribe being in 1 Chronicles 27:22—was due to their intermarriages with the Phoenicians.