The priest’s heart was glad. — Judges 19:6; Judges 19:9; Ruth 3:7. The disgraceful alacrity with which he sanctions the theft, and abandons for self-interest the cause of Micah, is very unworthy of a grandson of Moses. Dean Stanley appositely compares the bribe offered in 1176 to the monk Roger of Canterbury: — “Give us the portion of St. Thomas’s skull which is in thy custody, and thou shalt cease to be a simple monk; thou shalt be Abbot of St. Augustine’s.”
In the midst of the people. — That they might guard his person. It is not necessarily implied that he carried all these sacred objects himself; he may have done so, for the molten image, which was perhaps the heaviest object, is not here mentioned.