13. I have seen now how stiff-necked this people is, the Lord said to me.
14. Let me be, that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under the heavens. I will then make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.
15. When I had come down again from the blazing, fiery mountain, with the two tablets of the covenant in both my hands,
16. I saw how you had sinned against the Lord, your God, by making for yourselves a molten calf. You had already turned aside from the way which the Lord had commanded you.
17. I took hold of the two tablets and with both hands cast them from me and broke them before your eyes.
18. Then, as before, I lay prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights; I ate no food, I drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed in the sight of the Lord, doing wrong and provoking him.
19. For I dreaded the fierce anger of the Lord against you: his wrath would destroy you. Yet once again the Lord listened to me.
20. With Aaron, too, the Lord was deeply angry, and would have destroyed him; but I prayed for Aaron also at that time.