1 When the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses, the man who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
2 Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons, and your daughters are wearing and bring them to me.”
3 So all the people took off the gold earrings that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.
4 He took them from their hands, fashioned it with a graving tool, and made a molten calf. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt!”
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before the calf and proclaimed, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.”
6 Early the next day they rose up and offered burnt offerings and presented peace offerings. The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.
7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.
8 They have quickly turned aside from the way that I commanded them. They have made themselves a molten calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”
9 The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and indeed, it is a stiff-necked people.
10 Now therefore, let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, and I will make of you a great nation.”
11 Then Moses prayed before the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why should your anger burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?”
12 Why should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth”? Turn from your fierce anger and relent from this disaster that you will bring on your people.
13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self, saying, “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and I will give them all this land I promised them, and they will possess it forever.”
14 Then the Lord relented from the disaster he had said he would bring on his people.
15 So Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hand. The tablets were written on both sides; on both sides they were written.
16 The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.
17When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, “There is a sound of war in the camp.”
18 But he said, “It is not the sound of the shouting of warriors, nor the sound of the shouting of warriors; it is the sound of singing that I hear.”
19 When he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.
20 He took the calf they had made, burned it in the fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.
21 Then Moses said to Aaron, “What has this people done to you, that you have brought such a great sin upon them?”
22 Aaron answered, “Do not be angry, my lord; you know the people, how prone they are to evil.
23 For they said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us; For as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.