Deuteronomy 9:8-21

⁸Even at Horeb you provoked the Lord to anger, and the Lord was so angry with you that He would have destroyed you. ⁹When I went up to the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you, then I remained on the mountain for forty days and nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water. ¹⁰The Lord gave me the two tablets of stone written by the finger of God; and on them were all the words which the Lord had spoken with you at the mountain from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. ¹¹It came about at the end of forty days and nights that the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant. ¹²Then the Lord said to me, ‘Arise, go down from here quickly, because your people, whom you brought out of Egypt, have behaved corruptly. They have quickly turned aside from the way that I commanded them; they have made a cast metal image for themselves.’ ¹³The Lord also said to me, ‘I have seen this people, and indeed, it is a stubborn people. ¹⁴Leave Me alone, that I may destroy them and wipe out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.’

¹⁵“So I turned and came down from the mountain while the mountain was burning with fire, and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. ¹⁶And I saw that you had indeed sinned against the Lord your God. You had made for yourselves a cast metal image of a calf; you had quickly turned aside from the way that the Lord had commanded you. ¹⁷So I took hold of the two tablets and threw them from my two hands, and smashed them to pieces before your eyes! ¹⁸Then I fell down before the Lord like the first time, for forty days and nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all your sin which you had committed by doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger. ¹⁹For I was afraid of the anger and the rage with which the Lord was angry with you so as to destroy you; but the Lord listened to me that time as well. ²⁰The Lord was also angry enough with Aaron to destroy him; so I also prayed for Aaron at the same time. ²¹And I took your sinful thing which you had made, the calf, and burned it in the fire and crushed it, grinding it thoroughly until it was as fine as dust; and I threw its dust into the stream that came down from the mountain.