The refusal, and the sentence. God offers to destroy the nation and start again from Moses, and Moses talks him out of it — not by pleading the people’s merits but by asking what Egypt will conclude, and then by quoting God’s own self-description from Exodus 34 back at him, shortened, with the merciful parts left out. The answer is a pardon and forty years. Nearly every sentence passed is the people’s own words returned to them.