Bible Browser

²¹This is the word that the Lord has spoken concerning him:
She despises you, she scorns you—
   virgin daughter Zion;
she tosses her head—behind your back,
   daughter Jerusalem.

²² ‘Whom have you mocked and reviled?
   Against whom have you raised your voice
and haughtily lifted your eyes?
   Against the Holy One of Israel!
²³ By your messengers you have mocked the Lord,
   and you have said, “With my many chariots
I 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 retreat,
   its densest forest.
²⁴ I dug wells
   and drank foreign waters,
I dried up with the sole of my foot
   all the streams of Egypt.”

²⁵ ‘Have you not heard
   that I determined it long ago?
I planned from days of old
   what now I bring to pass,
that you should make fortified cities
   crash into heaps of ruins,
²⁶ while their inhabitants, shorn of strength,
   are dismayed and confounded;
they have become like plants of the field
   and like tender grass,
like grass on the housetops,
   blighted before it is grown.

²⁷ ‘But I know your rising^* and your sitting,
   your going out and coming in,
   and your raging against me.
²⁸ Because you have raged against me
   and your arrogance has come to my ears,
I will put my hook in your nose
   and my bit in your mouth;
I will turn you back on the way
   by which you came.

29 ‘And this shall be the sign for you: This year you shall eat what grows of itself, and in the second year what springs from that; then in the third year sow, reap, plant vineyards, and eat their fruit. ³⁰The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards; ³¹for from Jerusalem a remnant shall go out, and from Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

32 ‘Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege-ramp against it. ³³By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the Lord. ³⁴For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.’

Sennacherib’s Defeat and Death

35 That very night the angel of the Lord set out and struck down one hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; when morning dawned, they were all dead bodies. ³⁶Then King Sennacherib of Assyria left, went home, and lived at Nineveh.