God ¹  said, “Take your son – your only son, whom you love, Isaac ²  – and go to the land of Moriah! ³  Offer him up there as a burnt offering ⁴  on one of the mountains which I will indicate to ⁵  you.”

Now Moses ¹  was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert ²  and came to the mountain of God, to Horeb. ³ 

He replied, ¹  “Surely I will be with you, ²  and this will be the sign ³  to you that I have sent you: When you bring the people out of Egypt, you and they will serve ⁴  God on this mountain.”

No hand will touch him ¹  – but he will surely be stoned or shot through, whether a beast or a human being; ²  he must not live.’ When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast they may ³  go up on the mountain.”

On ¹  the third day in the morning there was thunder and lightning and a dense ²  cloud on the mountain, and the sound of a very loud ³  horn; ⁴  all the people who were in the camp trembled.

and Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. Early in the morning he built ¹  an altar at the foot ²  of the mountain and arranged ³  twelve standing stones ⁴  – according to the twelve tribes of Israel.

¹ The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me to the mountain and remain there, and I will give you the stone tablets ²  with ³  the law and the commandments that I have written, so that you may teach them.” ⁴ 

Why ¹  should the Egyptians say, ²  ‘For evil ³  he led them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy ⁴  them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger, and relent ⁵  of this evil against your people.

When he approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses became extremely angry. ¹  He threw the tablets from his hands and broke them to pieces at the bottom of the mountain. ² 

So Moses ¹  cut out two tablets of stone like the first; ²  early in the morning he went up ³  to Mount Sinai, just as the Lord had commanded him, and he took in his hand the two tablets of stone.

Aaron the priest ascended Mount Hor at the command ¹  of the Lord, and he died there in the fortieth year after the Israelites had come out of the land of Egypt on the first day of the fifth month.

Then we left Horeb and passed through all that immense, forbidding wilderness that you saw on the way to the Amorite hill country as the Lord our God had commanded us to do, finally arriving at Kadesh Barnea.

Then you responded to me and admitted, “We have sinned against the Lord. We will now go up and fight as the Lord our God has told us to do.” So you each put on your battle gear and prepared to go up to the hill country.

Do not be hostile toward them, because I am not giving you any of their land, not even a footprint, for I have given Mount Seir ¹  as an inheritance for Esau.

(I was standing between the Lord and you at that time to reveal to you the message ¹  of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire and would not go up the mountain.) He said:

The Lord said these things to your entire assembly at the mountain from the middle of the fire, the cloud, and the darkness with a loud voice, and that was all he said. ¹  Then he inscribed the words ²  on two stone tablets and gave them to me.

The Lord gave me the two stone tablets, written by the very finger ¹  of God, and on them was everything ²  he ³  said to you at the mountain from the midst of the fire at the time of that assembly.

As for your sinful thing ¹  that you had made, the calf, I took it, melted it down, ²  ground it up until it was as fine as dust, and tossed the dust into the stream that flows down the mountain.

The Lord ¹  then wrote on the tablets the same words, ²  the ten commandments, ³  which he ⁴  had spoken to you at the mountain from the middle of the fire at the time of that assembly, and he ⁵  gave them to me.

As for me, I stayed at the mountain as I did the first time, forty days and nights. The Lord listened to me that time as well and decided not to destroy you.