The Golden Calf

32 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”^(A)

⁴⁰ saying to Aaron, ‘Make gods for us who will lead the way for us; as for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.’^(A)

⁹ When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that the Lord made with you, I remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water.^(A)

⁴ and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died,^[a] all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!”^(A)

⁴⁸ But if that wicked slave says to himself, ‘My master is delayed,’

¹⁸ Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.^(A)

¹¹ At the end of forty days and forty nights the Lord gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant. ¹² Then the Lord said to me, ‘Get up; go down quickly from here, for your people whom you have brought from Egypt have acted corruptly. They have been quick to turn from the way that I commanded them; they have cast an image for themselves.’^(A)

²⁹ “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.^(A)

²⁶ You also see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost the whole of Asia this Paul has persuaded and drawn away a considerable number of people by saying that gods made with hands are not gods.^(A)