13. Where is the king of Hamath, the king of Arpad, the king of the city of Sepharvaim, the king of Hena, or the king of Ivvah?’”
14. Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it; and Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord.
15. And Hezekiah prayed before the Lord and said: “O Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth.
16. Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God.
17. Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands
18. and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were not gods, but the work of men’s hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed.
19. So now, O Lord our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.”
20. Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Your prayer to me about Sennacherib king of Assyria I have heard.
21. This is the word that the Lord has spoken concerning him:“She despises you, she scorns you— the virgin daughter of Zion;she wags her head behind you—the daughter of Jerusalem.
22. “Whom have you mocked and reviled?Against whom have you raised your voiceand lifted your eyes to the heights?Against the Holy One of Israel!
23. By your messengers you have mocked the Lord,and you have said, ‘With my many chariotsI 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 lodging place,its most fruitful forest.
24. I dug wellsand drank foreign waters,and I dried up with the sole of my footall the streams of Egypt.’
25. “Have you not heardthat I determined it long ago?I planned from days of oldwhat now I bring to pass,that you should turn fortified citiesinto heaps of ruins,
26. while their inhabitants, shorn of strength,are dismayed and confounded,and have become like plants of the fieldand like tender grass,like grass on the housetops,blighted before it is grown.
27. “But I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in,and your raging against me.
28. Because you have raged against meand your complacency has come into my ears,I will put my hook in your noseand my bit in your mouth,and I will turn you back on the wayby which you came.
29. “And this shall be the sign for you: this year eat what grows of itself, and in the second year what springs of the same. Then in the third year sow and reap and plant vineyards, and eat their fruit.
30. And the surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward.
31. For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord will do this.
32. “Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there, or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it.
33. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the Lord.