Moses is on the mountain and the people below decide he is not coming back. Aaron takes their gold, casts a calf, and the people say these be thy gods, O Israel — a sentence that appears once more in the Bible, almost word for word, in the mouth of a king setting up two golden calves four centuries later. What follows is the ugliest sequence in Exodus, and it ends with Moses offering to be erased from God’s book. God declines the trade.