23. By your messengersyou have ridiculed the Lord.And you have said,‘With my many chariotsI have ascended the heights of the mountains,the utmost heights of Lebanon.I have cut down its tallest cedars,the choicest of its junipers.I have reached its remotest parts,the finest of its forests.
24. I have dug wells in foreign landsand drunk the water there.With the soles of my feetI have dried up all the streams of Egypt.’
25. ‘ “Have you not heard?Long ago I ordained it.In days of old I planned it;now I have brought it to pass,that you have turned fortified citiesinto piles of stone.
26. Their people, drained of power,are dismayed and put to shame.They are like plants in the field,like tender green shoots,like grass sprouting on the roof,scorched before it grows up.
27. ‘ “But I know where you areand when you come and goand how you rage against me.
28. Because you rage against meand because your insolence has reached my ears,I will put my hook in your noseand my bit in your mouth,and I will make you returnby the way you came.”
29. ‘This will be the sign for you, Hezekiah:‘This year you will eat what grows by itself,and the second year what springs from that.But in the third year sow and reap,plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
30. Once more a remnant of the kingdom of Judahwill take root below and bear fruit above.
31. For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant,and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors.‘The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.
32. ‘Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria:‘ “He will not enter this cityor shoot an arrow here.He will not come before it with shieldor build a siege ramp against it.
33. By the way that he came he will return;he will not enter this city,”declares the Lord.
34. “I will defend this city and save it,for my sake and for the sake of David my servant.” ’
35. That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning – there were all the dead bodies!
36. So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.
37. One day, while he was worshipping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king.