Deuteronomy 9:8–21

⁸Also ^min Horeb you provoked the Lord to wrath, so that the Lord was angry enough with you to have destroyed you. ⁹ⁿWhen I went up into the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you, then I stayed on the mountain forty days and ^oforty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water. ^10pThen the Lord delivered to me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them were all the words which the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire ^qin ³the day of the assembly. ¹¹And it came to pass, at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant.

¹²“Then the Lord said to me, ^r‘Arise, go down quickly from here, for your people whom you brought out of Egypt have acted corruptly; they have ^squickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them; they have made themselves a molded image.’

¹³“Furthermore ^tthe Lord spoke to me, saying, ‘I have seen this people, and indeed ^uthey are a ⁴stiff-necked people. ^14vLet Me alone, that I may destroy them and ^wblot out their name from under heaven; ^xand I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.’

^15y“So I turned and came down from the mountain, and ^zthe mountain burned with fire; and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. ¹⁶And ^aI looked, and behold, you had sinned against the Lord your God—had made for yourselves a molded calf! You had turned aside quickly from the way which the Lord had commanded you. ¹⁷Then I took the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and ^bbroke them before your eyes. ¹⁸And I ^cfell ⁵down before the Lord, as at the first, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all your sin which you committed in doing wickedly in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger. ^19dFor I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure with which the Lord was angry with you, to destroy you. ^eBut the Lord listened to me at that time also. ²⁰And the Lord was very angry with Aaron and would have destroyed him; so I prayed for Aaron also at the same time. ²¹Then I took your sin, the calf which you had made, and burned it with fire and crushed it and ground it very small, until it was as fine as dust; and I ^fthrew its dust into the brook that descended from the mountain.