24. By your servants you have mocked, reproached, insulted, and defied the Lord, and you have said, With my many chariots I have gone up to the height of the mountains, to the inner recesses of Lebanon. I cut down its tallest cedars and its choicest cypress trees; I came to its remotest height, its most luxuriant and dense forest;
25. I dug wells and drank foreign waters, and with the sole of my feet I have dried up all the rivers [the Nile streams] of Egypt.
26. [But, says the God of Israel] have you not heard that I purposed to do it long ago, that I planned it in ancient times? Now I have brought it to pass, that you [king of Assyria] should [be My instrument to] lay waste fortified cities, making them ruinous heaps.
27. Therefore their inhabitants had little power, they were dismayed and confounded; they were like the grass of the field and like the green herb, like the grass on the housetops and like a field of grain blasted before it is grown or is in stalk.
28. But I [the Lord] know your sitting down and your going out and your coming in and your raging against Me.
29. Because your raging against Me and your arrogance and careless ease have come to My ears, therefore will I put My hook in your nose and My bridle in your lips, and I will turn you back by the way you came.
30. And [now, Hezekiah, says the Lord] this shall be the sign [of these things] to you: you shall eat this year what grows of itself, and in the second year that which springs from the same. And in the third year sow and reap, and plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them.
31. And the remnant that has survived of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward.
32. For out of Jerusalem will go forth a remnant, and a band that survives out of Mount Zion. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
33. Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow here or come before it with shield or cast up a siege mound against it.
34. By the way that he came, by the same way he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, says the Lord.