²¹This is the word that the LORD has spoken concerning him: 
     She despises you, she scorns you — 
          virgin daughter Zion; 
     she tosses her head — behind your back, 
          daughter Jerusalem. 

²²  Whom have you mocked and reviled? 
          Against whom have you raised your voice 
     and haughtily lifted your eyes? 
          Against the Holy One of Israel! 
²³  By your messengers you have mocked the Lord, 
          and you have said, ‘With my many chariots 
     I have gone up the heights of the mountains, 
          to the far recesses of Lebanon; 
     I felled its tallest cedars, 
          its choicest cypresses; 
     I entered its farthest retreat, 
          its densest forest. 
²⁴  I dug wells 
          and drank foreign waters, 
     I dried up with the sole of my foot 
          all the streams of Egypt.’

²⁵  “Have you not heard 
          that I determined it long ago? 
     I planned from days of old 
          what now I bring to pass, 
     that you should make fortified cities 
          crash into heaps of ruins, 
²⁶  while their inhabitants, shorn of strength, 
          are dismayed and confounded; 
     they have become like plants of the field 
          and like tender grass, 
     like grass on the housetops, 
          blighted before it is grown.

²⁷  “But I know your rising and your sitting, 
          your going out and coming in, 
          and your raging against me. 
²⁸  Because you have raged against me 
          and your arrogance has come to my ears, 
     I will put my hook in your nose 
          and my bit in your mouth; 
     I will turn you back on the way 
          by which you came.

²⁹“And this shall be the sign for you: This year you shall eat what grows of itself, and in the second year what springs from that; then in the third year sow, reap, plant vineyards, and eat their fruit. ³⁰The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward; ³¹for from Jerusalem a remnant shall go out, and from Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

³²“Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it. ³³By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the LORD. ³⁴For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”

³⁵That very night the angel of the LORD set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies. ³⁶Then King Sennacherib of Assyria left, went home, and lived at Nineveh.