5. Not for your righteousness, or for the uprightness of your heart, do you go in to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God does drive them out from before you, and that he may establish the word which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
6. Know therefore, that the Lord your God doesn’t give you this good land to possess for your righteousness; for you are a stiff-necked people.
7. Remember, and don’t forget, how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day that you left the land of Egypt, until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the Lord.
8. Also in Horeb you provoked the Lord to wrath, and the Lord was angry with you to destroy you.
9. When I had gone up onto the mountain to receive the stone tablets, even the tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you, then I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water.
10. The Lord delivered to me the two stone tablets written with God’s finger. On them were all the words which the Lord spoke with you on the mountain out of the middle of the fire in the day of the assembly.
11. It came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the Lord gave me the two stone tablets, even the tablets of the covenant.
12. The Lord said to me, “Arise, get down quickly from here; for your people whom you have brought out of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have quickly turned away from the way which I commanded them. They have made a molten image for themselves!”
13. Furthermore the Lord spoke to me, saying, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.
14. Leave me alone, that I may destroy them, and blot out their name from under the sky; and I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.”
15. So I turned and came down from the mountain, and the mountain was burning with fire. The two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands.
16. I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the Lord your God. You had made yourselves a moulded calf. You had quickly turned away from the way which the Lord had commanded you.