Deuteronomy 9:13–29

¹³The LORD also said to me, “I have seen this people, and they are indeed a stiff-necked people. ¹⁴Leave Me alone, so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven. Then I will make you into a nation mightier and greater than they are.”

¹⁵So I went back down the mountain while it was blazing with fire, with the two tablets of the covenant in my hands. ¹⁶And I saw how you had sinned against the LORD your God; you had made for yourselves a molten calf. You had turned aside quickly from the way that the LORD had commanded you. ¹⁷So I took the two tablets and threw them out of my hands, shattering them before your eyes.

¹⁸Then I fell down before the LORD for forty days and forty nights, as I had done the first time. I did not eat bread or drink water because of all the sin you had committed in doing what was evil in the sight of the LORD and provoking Him to anger. ¹⁹For I was afraid^b of the anger and wrath that the LORD had directed against you, enough to destroy you. But the LORD listened to me this time as well.

²⁰The LORD was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, but at that time I also prayed for Aaron. ²¹And I took that sinful thing, 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 I cast it into the stream that came down from the mountain.

²²You continued to provoke the LORD at Taberah,^c at Massah,^d and at Kibroth-hattaavah.^{e 23}And when the LORD sent you out from Kadesh-barnea, He said, “Go up and possess the land that I have given you.”

But you rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. You neither believed Him nor obeyed Him. ²⁴You have been rebelling against the LORD since the day I came to know you. ²⁵So I fell down before the LORD for forty days and forty nights, because the LORD had said He would destroy you.

²⁶And I prayed to the LORD and said, “O Lord GOD, do not destroy Your people, Your inheritance, whom You redeemed through Your greatness and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. ²⁷Remember Your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Overlook the stubbornness of this people and the wickedness of their sin. ²⁸Otherwise, those in the land from which You brought us out will say, ‘Because the LORD was not able to bring them into the land He had promised them, and because He hated them, He has brought them out to kill them in the wilderness.’ ²⁹But they are Your people, Your inheritance, whom You brought out by Your great power and outstretched arm.”