Exodus 32 Summary and Study Guide

On top of the mountain God was giving Moses the plans for a tent where He would live among His people. At the foot of it they were melting their earrings into a calf. This Exodus 32 summary and study guide follows the chapter through that collision and the questions it leaves behind.

Setting the Stage

Three months out of Egypt, Israel camped at Mount Sinai and heard God speak the Ten Commandments out loud. The second of them forbade making a carved image of anything at all to bow down to (Exodus 20:4-5).

Then the whole nation swore to obey. Twice they said it: “All that the LORD hath said will we do” (Exodus 24:7). Blood was sprinkled to seal the agreement, and Moses went up into the cloud for forty days, leaving Aaron and Hur in charge of the camp below (Exodus 24:14, 18).

That oath is what Exodus 32 tests, and the people had not yet moved from the ground where they made it. For where this sits in the wider story, see our Book of Exodus summary by chapter.

Comprehensive Exodus 32 Summary

Moses does not come back when the people expect him. They crowd around Aaron, tell him they have no idea what has become of Moses, and demand a god to go in front of them, the way the pillar of cloud had gone before them out of Egypt (Exodus 13:21). Aaron asks for their gold earrings, and all the people hand their gold over.

He works it into a calf with a graving tool, and they say this is the god who brought them out of Egypt. Aaron then builds an altar in front of it and announces a feast to the LORD, using God’s own name for the day. In the morning they offer sacrifices, sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to celebrate.

God tells Moses on the mountain what has happened, calls Israel a stiff-necked people, and offers to destroy them and start again with Moses instead. Moses will not have it. He gives God three reasons to spare them: they are God’s own people, Egypt will say God rescued them only to kill them, and God swore an oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God relents.

Moses comes down with the stone tablets, hears the singing, sees the calf, and smashes the tablets at the foot of the mountain. He burns the calf, grinds it to powder and makes Israel drink it in their water. Aaron blames the people.

Moses stands in the gate and calls the camp to choose sides; the Levites come, and about three thousand men die that day. The next morning Moses climbs back up and offers to be blotted out of God’s book if that is what it takes to save them. God refuses the trade, sends them on toward the land with an angel, and holds the reckoning over for another day.

One Word Summary

• Impatience: they could not wait out a delay of a few weeks
• Substitution: they swapped an unseen God for a visible copy of Him
• Intercession: one man stood between a nation and its destruction

In One Sentence

While Moses is on Sinai receiving God’s law, Aaron makes Israel a golden calf and calls a feast to the LORD in front of it, and God spares the nation only because Moses pleads God’s own promises, though three thousand men still die and God defers the rest of the reckoning.

Theme of Exodus 32

Exodus 32 is about worship that keeps God’s name and loses God. Israel never announces that it is leaving the LORD. It builds Him a statue, puts His name on the day, and calls that worship, and God treats it as the covenant broken. Two things run alongside that.

Judgment is real and it lands: the idol is destroyed, the covenant tablets lie in pieces, and men die in the camp. And mercy reaches Israel through one man standing in the gap, who argues from God’s own character rather than from anything Israel deserves, and who holds back a punishment he is not allowed to carry himself.

Exodus 32 Outline

• Exodus 32:1-4: The people demand a god from Aaron, give up their gold earrings, and Aaron makes a golden calf they hail as the god who brought them out of Egypt.
• Exodus 32:5-6: Aaron builds an altar before the calf and proclaims a feast to the LORD, and the next morning the people offer sacrifices, eat, drink and rise up to play.
• Exodus 32:7-10: God tells Moses what the camp has done, calls Israel stiff-necked, and offers to destroy them and make Moses into a great nation.
• Exodus 32:11-14: Moses pleads God’s power, God’s reputation in Egypt, and God’s oath to the patriarchs, and God relents from the destruction He had spoken of.
• Exodus 32:15-18: Moses starts down with the two stone tablets, and Joshua mistakes the noise from the camp for the sound of war.
• Exodus 32:19-20: Moses sees the calf and the dancing, smashes the tablets, then burns the calf, grinds it to powder and makes Israel drink it.
• Exodus 32:21-24: Moses questions Aaron, and Aaron blames the people and claims the calf came out of the fire on its own.
• Exodus 32:25-29: Moses calls the camp to take sides, the Levites answer, and about three thousand men fall by their swords.
• Exodus 32:30-32: Moses tells the people they have sinned a great sin, goes back up the mountain, and asks God to blot him out instead of them.
• Exodus 32:33-35: God refuses the exchange, sends His angel ahead of the people, holds their sin over for a later day, and strikes them with a plague.

Moses’ Intercession

Moses prays twice in this chapter. The first prayer is an argument. The second is an offer.

The first prayer (Exodus 32:11-13) makes three appeals, and not one of them is about Israel deserving anything.

• God’s own work. “LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?” (Exodus 32:11). God had just called them Moses’ people. Moses hands them straight back and reminds God that God is the one who rescued them, at great cost, with His own strong hand.
• God’s name among the nations. “Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains?” (Exodus 32:12). If Israel dies in the desert now, the Egyptians will say their God led them out with harm in mind all along.
• God’s oath. “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self” (Exodus 32:13). God had sworn a promise to the fathers by Himself, having nothing greater to swear by, and Moses asks Him to keep it.

The second prayer (Exodus 32:30-32) comes after the judgment, and it costs him. He tells the people first: “Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto the LORD; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin” (Exodus 32:30). He is not promising them anything. Perhaps, he says, he can cover what they have done.

Then he says it to God, and the sentence does not finish:

“Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin–; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”

Exodus 32:32

If God will forgive them, Moses has nothing more to ask. If God will not, he asks to have his own name struck out of God’s book along with theirs. The break in the middle of the verse is in the Hebrew too, and Moses never finishes the first half.

Observations from Exodus 32

Anger Changes Owner Four Times (Exodus 32:10, 11, 19, 22)

God’s wrath waxes hot against the people (Exodus 32:10). Moses asks God why His wrath waxes hot (Exodus 32:11). Then Moses’ own anger waxes hot when he sees the calf (Exodus 32:19). Then Aaron begs Moses, “Let not the anger of my lord wax hot” (Exodus 32:22), which means: please do not be so angry with me.

Aaron is frightened of his brother. In the whole chapter he never once speaks of being frightened of God. Fear aimed at the person standing in front of you, rather than at the God above you, can build a great deal before anyone puts a stop to it.

Aaron Quotes the People Word for Word and Misquotes Himself (Exodus 32:23-24)

Aaron’s memory is excellent when the subject is somebody else. His account of what the people said in verse 23 repeats verse 1 almost exactly, down to the phrase about not knowing what had become of Moses.

Then he reaches his own part and the accuracy stops. “I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Exodus 32:24), he says, meaning the gold went in and the calf came out by itself. Verse 4 says he fashioned it with a graving tool. Moses does not answer him. Confessing a sin as something that happened to you is not confessing it.

The Altar Was Worse Than the Calf (Exodus 32:4-5)

Making the calf was bad enough. Aaron then did something that took more thought. He built an altar in front of it, and he announced, “To morrow is a feast to the LORD” (Exodus 32:5). Tomorrow, he says, is a festival day for Yahweh.

He put God’s own covenant name on the day. Worship carried out in God’s name is not automatically worship God receives, and the pattern outlasted him: when the kingdom split centuries later, Jeroboam set up two golden calves and repeated what Israel had shouted at Sinai almost word for word, “behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28).

Look at your gods, he told them, the ones who rescued you from Egypt.

The Call at the Gate Was Three Words and Required Moving (Exodus 32:26)

“Who is on the LORD’S side? let him come unto me” is a short sentence in English and shorter in Hebrew, where it runs to three words. Moses offers the camp no argument and no persuasion. He asks people to walk across open ground in front of their neighbours.

Only one tribe walked. The Levites were a small fraction of the nation, and they were not a clean tribe either, since the order Moses gave them next reached inside their own families. Moses puts the question in a form that an opinion cannot answer. It is answered with feet.

Levi’s Priesthood Is Marked Out in This Chapter (Exodus 32:29)

Moses tells the Levites, “Consecrate yourselves to day to the LORD” (Exodus 32:29). Set yourselves apart for God today, he says. The Hebrew reads literally “fill your hand”, the standard phrase for installing a man as a priest, so the tribe that would carry Israel’s sanctuary for the rest of the Old Testament has its calling marked out on one of the worst days in the nation’s history.

Jacob had once cursed Levi for a massacre driven by family loyalty: “Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce” (Genesis 49:7). Here the same tribe turns the same hardness the other way, against their own families and for God, and Moses’ last blessing on Levi names exactly that: “Who said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him” (Deuteronomy 33:9). Levi would not let family decide, and this time it counted for them.

Difficult Verses Explained

Did God Change His Mind in Exodus 32:14?

The verse says, “And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” God turned back from the harm He had said He would bring on them. Elsewhere Scripture says the opposite about God: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19).

The best answer treats them as two different kinds of speech. When God swears an oath or issues a decree, it stands.

When God announces what He intends to do to a people who are still standing there, that announcement is open to what happens next, and He says so plainly: “If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them” (Jeremiah 18:8). If a nation turns from its wrongdoing, God turns from the disaster He had announced.

Exodus 32:10 was a threat with a door left open in the same sentence. God said “Let me alone”, which is a strange thing to say to a man unless you expect him to speak. And Psalm 106:23 tells us what actually changed that day: God “said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach”.

God would have destroyed Israel, and Moses stood in the gap and turned His anger away. Put the two passages side by side and this is what they leave: what moved that day was Israel’s standing before God, and God Himself stayed exactly who He had always been.

Why Did Moses Make Them Drink the Gold in Exodus 32:20?

Moses “burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it”. He burned the calf, ground what was left into dust, scattered the dust over the water and made the people swallow it.

Scripture does not say why, and three answers have been offered. It destroyed the idol past any hope of recovering it. It shamed the people by making them swallow the god they had just been dancing around.

And it may echo the test in Numbers 5, where a woman suspected of being unfaithful to her husband had to “drink the bitter water that causeth the curse” (Numbers 5:24). Israel was married to the LORD by covenant, and unfaithfulness is the charge here. The parallel is close, though the chapter never draws it, so it is worth holding loosely.

Were the People Naked in Exodus 32:25?

The King James says Moses “saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies)”. The Hebrew word behind “naked” is not settled. English versions render it naked, unrestrained, broken loose, running wild and out of control, and some commentators argue instead for “defenceless”, pointing to the same word in 2 Chronicles 28:19, where God “made Judah naked” by stripping away her protection.

Every one of those renderings fits something in the chapter, and the verse supplies its own point whichever is right. The point is exposure: whatever state they were in, Aaron had let them get into it, and it left them looking shameful to anyone watching.

What the word carries is disgrace. Whether anything beyond that happened, this verse does not say, and readers who take it as proof of a sexual act are asking one uncertain word to settle more than it can.

Was the Killing in Exodus 32:27-28 Indiscriminate?

The order is severe: “slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour” (Exodus 32:27). Every man was to kill his brother, his friend and the man living next to him.

Two things in the chapter argue against reading this as random slaughter. A way out came first: Moses stood in the gate and called anyone on the LORD’s side to come to him, and those who came were not touched.

Second, the command spared nobody on the grounds of family, not even the families of the men carrying it out. That fits a target picked by conduct rather than a headcount taken at random. About three thousand men fell, out of a nation that had counted six hundred thousand men on foot when it left Egypt (Exodus 12:37).

What Is the Book Moses Asks to Be Blotted Out Of?

“Blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written” (Exodus 32:32). Strike my name out of the book you wrote, Moses says.

The image comes from a register of citizens, a written list of those who belong. Christians have read it two ways. Some take it as the book of the living, so that Moses is asking to die with his people rather than outlive them.

Others take it as the book of life named later in Scripture (Psalm 69:28; Revelation 3:5), so that Moses is offering something far greater. Either way the offer is real and enormous, and Paul says something very like it about his own nation (Romans 9:3).

God’s answer moves the question off the book and onto the sinner: “Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book” (Exodus 32:33). The names God strikes out are the names of those who sinned against Him, and no other name may be substituted for them.

What Is “The Day When I Visit” in Exodus 32:34?

God says, “in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them”. There is a day coming when He will deal with what they have done.

The plague in verse 35 falls straight away. God is describing something else, held back for a later time. Many take that later day as the moment at Kadesh when the whole generation was told, “they shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers” (Numbers 14:23).

Every one of them would die outside the country God had promised their ancestors. The verse here names no date, so that identification is a reasonable reading rather than a certainty. What is plain is that God spared the nation and left the guilt standing.

The same verse carries a second blow. “Behold, mine Angel shall go before thee” reads at first like the promise God made back in Exodus 23:20, and the next chapter reveals the difference. God spells it out: “I will not go up in the midst of thee” (Exodus 33:3). He would send an angel ahead of them and stay out of the camp Himself. The people heard it and mourned (Exodus 33:4).

Common Misunderstandings

• That Israel abandoned the LORD for a different god. Aaron announced a feast to the LORD by name (Exodus 32:5), and God’s charge in verse 8 is that they made an image, worshipped it and sacrificed to it. Many read this as the second commandment broken rather than the first, since the command against carved images is the one the chapter shows them breaking (Exodus 20:4-5). It was no small loss either way: the psalmist says they “changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass” and “forgat God their saviour” (Psalm 106:20-21), trading the God who had rescued them for a picture of a grazing animal.
• That Aaron was tricked or overpowered. The chapter has him take the gold, work it into the shape of a calf, and then build an altar for it (Exodus 32:4-5). His own account in verse 24 leaves all of that out.
• That “rose up to play” proves an orgy. The Hebrew word covers laughing, mocking, dancing and, in some places, sexual play. It can carry that meaning, and Exodus 32 never says it does. Paul quotes this exact verse and names the sin for us: “Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play” (1 Corinthians 10:7). Do not be idol-worshippers the way some of them were, he says, and the sin he is warning against is idolatry.
• That God is fickle because He relented. Exodus 32:10 is a stated intention, not an oath. God had already told Israel what idolatry earned (Exodus 22:20), and He held the threat back when Moses pleaded.
• That Moses sinned by breaking the tablets. Some readers assume it was a loss of temper he should have controlled. Scripture records no rebuke for it, and Moses reports the act himself without apology when he retells the story (Deuteronomy 9:17).
• That God withdrew from Israel on the spot. Commentators sometimes suggest the pillar of cloud had already left the camp, and that this is why the people wanted something visible. Nehemiah looks back on this very chapter, names the calf outright, and then says of God: “Yet thou in thy manifold mercies forsookest them not in the wilderness: the pillar of the cloud departed not from them by day” (Nehemiah 9:19). God’s great mercy kept Him from abandoning them in the desert, and the cloud that led them by day never moved off.

Christ Connection

Moses does in this chapter what a go-between does. He stands between a holy God and a guilty people, and when pleading God’s promises leaves the guilt still standing, he offers his own name in their place. Then God says no. “Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book” (Exodus 32:33).

God will not take Moses in the place of the guilty, and the reason lies in Moses himself: he is a man who needs a mediator as much as they do. The offer was real, it was costly, and it was refused, and the refusal is the point. The greatest man in Israel could hold a judgment back and could go no further than that.

That is the space the New Testament fills. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). There is one God and one go-between, and He is a man. Where Moses said perhaps he could make an atonement, Christ made one: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

Hebrews calls Him “the mediator of the new testament”, the go-between of a new agreement, whose death paid for the sins committed under the old one (Hebrews 9:15). Moses prayed for Israel twice in this chapter and both times had to come back down the mountain; of Christ it is written that “he ever liveth to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25), which means He is alive and praying for His people still.

The broken tablets belong here too. Moses shattered the law Israel had already broken, and God later promised a covenant He would write where stone cannot break: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). God would put His law inside His people rather than in front of them.

When, Where, and Why

• When: During the forty days and nights Moses spent on Mount Sinai (Exodus 24:18), in the same year Israel came out of Egypt and roughly three months after the exodus (Exodus 19:1).
• Where: The camp at the foot of Mount Sinai, whose summit had looked to them like devouring fire when Moses went up (Exodus 24:17). The water Moses used came from the brook running down off the mountain (Deuteronomy 9:21), so the water flowing past the camp carried the dust of the calf.
• Why: Moses records this because the covenant Israel had just sworn was broken before it was ever carried out, and because three things the rest of the Pentateuch assumes begin here: why the tribe of Levi serves at the sanctuary, why God’s presence among Israel becomes the burning question of the next two chapters, and why this generation’s future in the promised land is left hanging over them.

Key Verses

“Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.”

Exodus 32:1

Get up and make us a god to lead us, they say, because we have no idea what has happened to this Moses. The whole failure is in that sentence. They credit the rescue to a man, and when the man is late they conclude the rescue has run out.

Preaching centuries later, Stephen quoted these words and named what was underneath them: “in their hearts turned back again into Egypt” (Acts 7:39). In their hearts they had already set off back to the country God had brought them out of.

“And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD.”

Exodus 32:5

Aaron put up an altar in front of the calf and announced that the next day would be a festival for the LORD. Everything before this verse could still be read as Aaron caving in under pressure. Here he takes the lead: nobody asked him for an altar, and nobody asked him to name a holy day.

“Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD’S side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.”

Exodus 32:26

Moses took his stand at the entrance to the camp and asked who belonged to the LORD, and the Levites came over to him. It is the turn of the chapter, and it is the one moment in it where the people are asked to choose.

Key Lessons from Exodus 32

• A delay is not an absence, and Israel’s collapse began by treating one as the other (Exodus 32:1).
• What people are willing to hand over shows what they actually want, and Israel stripped off its gold for a calf without a recorded word of protest (Exodus 32:3).
• A leader who hands people what they demand can cost them more than their enemies could (Exodus 32:21-24).
• Prayer that argues from who God is and what God has promised can hold back a judgment, as Moses’ three appeals did (Exodus 32:11-14).
• Standing with God cost the Levites their standing with their own families, and Moses told them that was what consecrating themselves to the LORD looked like (Exodus 32:26-29).

To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Exodus 32.

Bible Study Questions

1. What exactly do the people ask Aaron for in Exodus 32:1, and how do they speak about Moses?
2. Aaron announces “a feast to the LORD” in verse 5. What does that tell you about what the people thought they were doing?
3. Moses makes three appeals in verses 11 to 13. What are they, and which one is about God’s reputation rather than about Israel?
4. Why does Moses ask Aaron “What did this people unto thee?” in verse 21 rather than accusing him outright?
5. What did answering Moses at the gate actually cost the Levites, according to verses 27 and 29?
6. Moses puts his own name on the line in verse 32. What does God’s reply in verse 33 say about who can answer for whose sin?
7. Where in this chapter do you see God’s mercy and God’s justice in the same answer?

Frequently Asked Questions

Exodus 32, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.

3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

5 And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD.

6 And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

7 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves:

8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

9 And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:

10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.

11 And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?

12 Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people.

13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever.

14 And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.

15 And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.

16 And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.

17 And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.

18 And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear.

19 And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

20 And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.

21 And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them?

22 And Aaron said, Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.

23 For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

24 And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.

25 And when Moses saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies:)

26 Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD’S side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.

27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.

28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

29 For Moses had said, Consecrate yourselves to day to the LORD, even every man upon his son, and upon his brother; that he may bestow upon you a blessing this day.

30 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses said unto the people, Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto the LORD; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.

31 And Moses returned unto the LORD, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold.

32 Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.

33 And the LORD said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book.

34 Therefore now go, lead the people unto the place of which I have spoken unto thee: behold, mine Angel shall go before thee: nevertheless in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them.

35 And the LORD plagued the people, because they made the calf, which Aaron made.