Delilah's Silver Becomes Micah's Idol and Moses' Grandson Serves It

Delilah counted the silver out on her knees, eleven hundred pieces from each Philistine lord, the price of one man's hair. She had sold Samson a strand at a time. Now the coins were hers, and they were cold, and they went where blood money always goes. Into the hands of her son.

His name was Micah, and he had a furnace.

The Silver That Remembered Samson

Micah owed his life to a miracle, which made what he did with the silver worse. In Egypt the taskmasters had set the Israelites a quota of bricks, and when the count came up short they took children and packed them into the wall as filler, mortared them in alive. Micah had been one of those children. He was already inside the wall, already part of it, when Moses came down the line.

Moses wrote the explicit Name, the Shem HaMeforesh (שֵׁם הַמְּפֹרָשׁ), on a shard and pressed it against the small dead body in the brick. The boy's chest moved. Moses pulled him out of the wall by the arms, wet with mortar, and set him on his feet in the world again.

That boy grew up, took his mother's Philistine coins, and built a god out of them. He melted Delilah's silver in the furnace and poured it into a mold, and when it cooled he had an image. The same hands Moses had lifted out of the wall now lifted an idol off the casting bench.

The Sanctuary Three Miles From the Real One

Micah did not hide it. He built a house for it, a private mikdash (מִקְדָּשׁ), a sanctuary of his own, and he stocked it the way a merchant stocks a shop. Three images of boys. Three calves. A lion. An eagle. A dragon. A dove.

Each one sold a different thing. People went to the dove for a wife and to the eagle for riches. The calves answered for daughters, the lion for strength, the dragon for long life. Nothing was free. A sacrifice cost real coin, didrachms, and even a pinch of incense had its price, paid to Micah, always to Micah.

He set it up near Shiloh, where the true sanctuary stood. From Gerav to Shiloh was three miles, and on a still day the smoke of the altar at Shiloh and the smoke of Micah's idol rose together and braided into one column over the hills. The ministering angels saw the two smokes mingle and moved to shove Micah out of the world.

The Holy One stopped them. "Leave him," He said. "His bread is set out for any traveler who passes."

That was the whole defense. Micah kept an open table. A man walking the road hungry could turn in at the idol-shrine and eat, and because of that one mercy the God whose altar he insulted from three miles off would not let the angels touch him.

The Levite Who Came Down the Road

A young man came through, a wanderer out of Bethlehem looking for a place. His father was a Levite, his mother of Judah, and Scripture would later call him by his mother's line. Micah took him in, paid him a wage, and dressed him as a household priest. The shrine had everything now. Images, an altar, smoke, and a man of the holy tribe to stand before it.

The young man knew the work was a sham. He had been taught better, taught by the highest mouth in Israel, and he carried one of that teaching's lines into the shrine and turned it inside out. He had heard that it is better to do avodah zarah (עֲבוֹדָה זָרָה) for hire than to fall on the charity of other men. The phrase was a warning. Strange work over dependence, take any honest labor before you beg. He read it as a license. Avodah zarah also means the service of strange gods, and that is the meaning he chose.

So he served idols and despised them at the same time. When a worshipper came leading an animal to slaughter before the image, the priest would stop him at the threshold. "What good can this thing do you?" he would ask. "It cannot see. It cannot hear. It cannot speak." The man would stand there shaken, his knife half-raised, doubting the whole errand. Then the priest would soften. "Bring a dish of flour and a few eggs instead. That is enough." The worshipper left lighter, half-converted, and the priest ate the flour and the eggs himself.

The Name the Verse Would Not Speak

Later Scripture set down his name and his line, and the line is the wound. "And Jonathan the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh" (Judges 18:30). Son of Manasseh, the wicked king who filled Jerusalem with idols. Except Gershom had no son named Manasseh in his blood. Gershom was the son of Moses. The priest of the idol was Moses' own grandson.

The verse could not bear to write it plainly, so it hung a letter into the name, a suspended nun (נ) floating above the line, and turned Moshe into Menashe to spare the holiest mouth in Israel the disgrace of his grandchild. From here the sages drew the rule. The fault is hung upon the faulty one. A man who does the deed of Manasseh gets written into Manasseh's house, no matter whose grandson he is.

The rescued child of the brick wall and the grandson of the man who rescued him stood at the two ends of the same shrine. One had melted Delilah's silver into a god. The other had been born to the man who carried the Name that raises the dead, and he used his inheritance to talk frightened pilgrims out of their goats and pocket their eggs. The smoke kept rising three miles from Shiloh, and God kept the angels off the open table, and the idol stood in the house of Micah until the day the land of Dan went into exile.