13. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance for ever.” ’
14. Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.
15. Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back.
16. The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.
17. When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, ‘There is the sound of war in the camp.’
18. Moses replied:‘It is not the sound of victory,it is not the sound of defeat;it is the sound of singing that I hear.’
19. When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain.
20. And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.
21. He said to Aaron, ‘What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?’