1 Clement
Chapter 53
- 1 For you have understanding, you have a good understanding of the sacred Scriptures, beloved, and you have studied the oracles of God. Therefore we write these things to remind you.
- 2 For when Moses went up into the mountain, and passed forty days and forty nights in fasting and humiliation, God said to him: “Go down hence quickly, for thy people, whom thou didst bring out of the land of Egypt, have committed iniquity; they have quickly gone aside out of the way which thou didst command them; they have made themselves molten images.”
- 3 And the Lord said to him: “I have spoken to thee once and twice, saying, I have seen this people, and behold it is stiffnecked; suffer me to destroy them, and I will wipe out their name from under heaven, and thee will I make into a nation great and wonderful and much more than this.”
- 4 And Moses said, “Not so, Lord; pardon the sin of this people, or blot me also out of the book of the living.”
- 5 O great love! O unsurpassable perfection! The servant is bold with the Lord, he asks forgiveness for the people, or begs that he himself may be blotted out together with them.