27. The people who lived there were powerless; they were frightened and stunned. They were like grass in a field or weeds growing on a roof when the hot east wind blasts them.
28. “But I know everything about you, what you do and where you go. I know how you rage against me.
29. I have received the report of that rage and that pride of yours, and now I will put a hook through your nose and a bit in your mouth and will take you back by the road on which you came.”
30. Then Isaiah said to King Hezekiah, “This is a sign of what will happen. This year and next you will have only wild grain to eat, but the following year you will be able to sow your corn and harvest it, and plant vines and eat grapes.
31. Those in Judah who survive will flourish like plants that send roots deep into the ground and produce fruit.
32. There will be people in Jerusalem and on Mount Zion who will survive, because the Lord Almighty is determined to make this happen.
33. “This is what the Lord has said about the Assyrian emperor: ‘He will not enter this city or shoot a single arrow against it. No soldiers with shields will come near the city, and no siege mounds will be built round it.
34. He will go back by the road on which he came, without entering this city. I, the Lord, have spoken.
35. I will defend this city and protect it, for the sake of my own honour and because of the promise I made to my servant David.’ ”
36. An angel of the Lord went to the Assyrian camp and killed 185,000 soldiers. At dawn the next day there they lay, all dead!
37. Then the Assyrian emperor Sennacherib withdrew and returned to Nineveh.
38. One day when he was worshipping in the temple of his god Nisroch, two of his sons, Adrammelech and Sharezer, killed him with their swords and then escaped to the land of Ararat. Another of his sons, Esarhaddon, succeeded him as emperor.