Deuteronomy 9:16-18

Amplified Bible

¹⁶And I saw that you had indeed sinned against the Lord your God. You had made for yourselves a molten ^[a]calf (idol). You had turned aside quickly from the way which the Lord had commanded you.^(A) ¹⁷So I took hold of the two tablets and threw them from my two hands and smashed them before your very eyes! ¹⁸Then, as before, I fell down before the Lord for [another] forty days and forty nights; I did not eat food or drink water, because of all the sin you had committed by doing ^[b]what was evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke Him to anger.

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Footnotes

Deuteronomy 9:16 The selection of a calf-god was probably inspired by the Egyptian bull-god Apis (Hapis), believed to be a living manifestation of the Egyptian god, Ptah. In ancient Egypt, a bull-calf with specific markings was selected from the herd and designated and worshiped as Apis. The Apis was the most important of the sacred animals of Egypt. At the age of twenty-eight the Apis bull was sacrificed and buried in a highly structured ritual and a new bull-calf was selected to take his place. Numerous elaborate burial sites containing the Apis bulls have been discovered in Egypt. Both the Greeks and Romans adopted the cultic worship of Apis and it continued until about a.d. 400.
Deuteronomy 9:18 Lit the evil, when the word “evil” (or other such word) is used with the definite article (“the evil”) without any contextual explanation, it refers to the evil of seeking salvation by some other way than that which is offered by God.