29. When the man said this, Moses fled and became a foreigner in the land of Midian, where he became the father of two sons.
30. “After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the desert of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush.
31. When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight, and when he approached to investigate, there came the voice of the Lord,
32. ‘I am the God of your forefathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ Moses began to tremble and did not dare to look more closely.
33. But the Lord said to him, ‘Take the sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.
34. I have certainly seen the suffering of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them. Now come, I will send you to Egypt.’
35. This same Moses they had rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and judge?’ God sent as both ruler and deliverer through the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush.
36. This man led them out, performing wonders and miraculous signs in the land of Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years.
37. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers.’
38. This is the man who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors, and he received living oracles to give to you.
39. Our ancestors were unwilling to obey him, but pushed him aside and turned back to Egypt in their hearts,
40. saying to Aaron, ‘Make us gods who will go in front of us, for this Moses, who led us out of the land of Egypt – we do not know what has happened to him!’
41. At that time they made an idol in the form of a calf, brought a sacrifice to the idol, and began rejoicing in the works of their hands.
42. But God turned away from them and gave them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: ‘It was not to me that you offered slain animals and sacrifices forty years in the wilderness, was it, house of Israel?
43. But you took along the tabernacle of Moloch and the star of the god Rephan, the images you made to worship, but I will deport you beyond Babylon.’
44. Our ancestors had the tabernacle of testimony in the wilderness, just as God who spoke to Moses ordered him to make it according to the design he had seen.
45. Our ancestors received possession of it and brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our ancestors, until the time of David.