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.
21. Then, taking the calf, the sinful object you had made, I burnt it and ground it down to powder as fine as dust, which I threw into the wadi that went down the mountainside.
22. At Taberah, at Massah, and at Kibroth-hattaavah likewise, you enraged the Lord.
23. And when the Lord sent you up from Kadesh-barnea saying, Go up and take possession of the land I have given you, you rebelled against this command of the Lord, your God, and would not believe him or listen to his voice.
24. You have been rebels against the Lord from the day I first knew you.
25. Those forty days, then, and forty nights, I lay prostrate before the Lord, because he had threatened to destroy you.
26. And I prayed to the Lord and said: O Lord God, do not destroy your people, the heritage you redeemed in your greatness and have brought out of Egypt with your strong hand.
27. Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do not look upon the stubbornness of this people nor upon their wickedness and sin,
28. lest the land from which you have brought us say, “The Lord was not able to bring them into the land he promised them, and out of hatred for them, he brought them out to let them die in the wilderness.”
29. They are your people and your heritage, whom you have brought out by your great power and with your outstretched arm.