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!^(A)
24 By 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.^(B)
25 I dug wells
    and drank waters;
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,^(C)
27 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
    that is scorched before the east wind.^[a](D)

²⁸ “I know your rising up^[b] and your sitting down,
    your going out and coming in
    and your raging against me.^(E)
29 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.^(F)

¹⁵ Shall the ax vaunt itself over the one who wields it
    or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it?
As if a rod should raise the one who lifts it up,
    or as if a staff should lift the one who is not wood!^(A)