We took your covenant, and raised the mount above you, "Take what We have given you with strength, and listen." They said, "We hear and disobey!" and they had consumed the calf inside their hearts by their rejection. Say, "Miserable indeed is what your acknowledgement instructs you if you are those who acknowledge!"
Translation endnotes
[2:93] To describe the mindless obsession of the ex-slave Children of Israel with cow worship, the Quran uses the metaphor "they consumed the calf inside their hearts." The more literal translation of this phrase would be: "the love of calf was sipped into their hearts." The similar Biblical metaphor using the key word "sip/drink," however, has been distorted through revisions, commentaries and translation errors, thereby transforming it into a bizarre story falsely attributed to Moses: "And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it" (Exodus 32:20). See 11:40-44; 16:103.