When I went up the mountain to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant the Lord made with you, I stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. I did not eat food or drink water.
It had the gold altar of incense and the ark of the covenant, covered with gold on all sides, in which was a gold jar containing the manna, Aaron’s staff that budded, and the tablets of the covenant.
They set out from the mountain of the Lord on a three-day journey with the ark of the Lord’s covenant travelling ahead of them for those three days to seek a resting place for them.
When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered round Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt #– #we don’t know what has happened to him! ’