6. Know this, therefore: it is not because of your justice that the Lord, your God, is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.
7. Remember and do not forget how you angered the Lord, your God, in the wilderness. From the day you left the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious toward the Lord.
8. At Horeb you so provoked the Lord that he was angry enough to destroy you,
9. when I had gone up the mountain to receive the stone tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you. Meanwhile I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights; I ate no food and drank no water.
10. The Lord gave me the two stone tablets inscribed, by God’s own finger, with a copy of all the words that the Lord spoke to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly.
11. Then, at the end of the forty days and forty nights, when the Lord had given me the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant,
12. the Lord said to me, Go down from here now, quickly, for your people whom you have brought out of Egypt are acting corruptly; they have already turned aside from the way I commanded them and have made for themselves a molten idol.
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.