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.