Isaiah 37:22–29

²²this 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.

²³‘Whom have you mocked and reviled?

Against whom have you raised your voice

and haughtily lifted your eyes?

Against the Holy One of Israel!

²⁴By your servants 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 came to its remotest height,

its densest forest.

²⁵I dug wells

and drank waters,

and I dried up with the sole of my foot

all the streams of Egypt.

²⁶‘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,

²⁷while their inhabitants, shorn of strength,

are dismayed and confounded,

and have become like plants of the field

and like tender grass,

like grass on the housetops,

blighted before it is grown.

²⁸‘I know your sitting down

and your going out and coming in,

and your raging against me.

²⁹Because 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,

and I will turn you back on the way

by which you came.’