Deuteronomy 9:8–21

⁸Even at Mount Sinai you made the Lord angry—angry enough to destroy you. ^9*I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets on which was written the covenant that the Lord had made with you. I stayed there forty days and nights and did not eat or drink anything. ¹⁰Then the Lord gave me the two stone tablets on which he had written with his own hand what he had said to you from the fire on the day that you were gathered there at the mountain. ¹¹Yes, after those forty days and nights the Lord gave me the two stone tablets on which he had written the covenant.

¹²“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Go down the mountain at once, because your people, whom you led out of Egypt, have become corrupt and have done evil. They have already turned away from what I commanded them to do, and they have made an idol for themselves.’

¹³“The Lord also said to me, ‘I know how stubborn these people are. ¹⁴Don’t try to stop me. I intend to destroy them so that no one will remember them any longer. Then I will make you the father of a nation larger and more powerful than they are.’

¹⁵“So I turned and went down the mountain, carrying the two stone tablets on which the covenant was written. Flames of fire were coming from the mountain. ¹⁶I saw that you had already disobeyed the command that the Lord your God had given you, and that you had sinned against him by making yourselves a metal idol in the form of a bull calf. ¹⁷So there in front of you I threw the stone tablets down and broke them to pieces. ¹⁸Then once again I lay face downwards in the Lord’s presence for forty days and nights and did not eat or drink anything. I did this because you had sinned against the Lord and had made him angry. ^19*I was afraid of the Lord’s fierce anger, because he was furious enough to destroy you; but once again the Lord listened to me. ²⁰The Lord was also angry enough with Aaron to kill him, so I prayed for Aaron at the same time. ²¹I took that sinful thing that you had made—that metal bull calf—and threw it into the fire. Then I broke it in pieces, ground it to dust, and threw the dust into the stream that flowed down the mountain.