12. Then the Lord told me, ‘Go down from here at once, because your people whom you brought out of Egypt have become corrupt. They have turned away quickly from what I commanded them and have made an idol for themselves.’
13. And the Lord said to me, ‘I have seen this people, and they are a stiff-necked people indeed!
14. Let me alone, so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven. And I will make you into a nation stronger and more numerous than they.’
15. So I turned and went down from the mountain while it was ablaze with fire. And the two tablets of the covenant were in my hands.
16. When I looked, I saw that you had sinned against the Lord your God; you had made for yourselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you.
17. So I took the two tablets and threw them out of my hands, breaking them to pieces before your eyes.
18. Then once again I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights; I ate no bread and drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed, doing what was evil in the Lord’s sight and so arousing his anger.
19. I feared the anger and wrath of the Lord, for he was angry enough with you to destroy you. But again the Lord listened to me.
20. And the Lord was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, but at that time I prayed for Aaron too.
21. Also I took that sinful thing of yours, the calf you had made, and burned it in the fire. Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust and threw the dust into a stream that flowed down the mountain.
22. You also made the Lord angry at Taberah, at Massah and at Kibroth Hattaavah.