8. They have quickly turned aside from the way I commanded them, making for themselves a molten calf and bowing down to it, sacrificing to it and crying out, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!”
9. I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are, continued the Lord to Moses.
10. Let me alone, then, that my anger may burn against them to consume them. Then I will make of you a great nation.
11. But Moses implored the Lord, his God, saying, “Why, O Lord, should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a strong hand?
12. Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent he brought them out, that he might kill them in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning wrath; change your mind about punishing your people.
13. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and how you swore to them by your own self, saying, ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky; and all this land that I promised, I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage.’”
14. So the Lord changed his mind about the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people.
15. Moses then turned and came down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hands, tablets that were written on both sides, front and back.
16. The tablets were made by God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.
17. Now, when Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, “That sounds like a battle in the camp.”