¹¹ Look! You have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands by utterly destroying them; and shall you be delivered?

¹³ Do you not know what I and my fathers have done to all the peoples of other lands? ^(A)Were the gods of the nations of those lands in any way able to deliver their lands out of my hand? ¹⁴ Who was there among all the gods of those nations that my fathers utterly destroyed that could deliver his people from my hand, that your God should be able to deliver you from my ^(B)hand?

¹⁷ Truly, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands, ¹⁸ and have cast their gods into the fire; for they were ^(A)not gods, but ^(B)the work of men’s hands—wood and stone. Therefore they destroyed them.

Israel Carried Captive to Assyria^(A)

⁵ Now ^(B)the king of Assyria went throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria and besieged it for three years. ^6 (C)In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and ^(D)carried Israel away to Assyria, ^(E)and placed them in Halah and by the Habor, the River of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

⁷ For ^(F)so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt; and they had ^(G)feared other gods, ⁸ and ^(H)had walked in the statutes of the nations whom the Lord had cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they had made. ⁹ Also the children of Israel secretly did against the Lord their God things that were not right, and they built for themselves ^[a]high places in all their cities, ^(I)from watchtower to fortified city. ^10 (J)They set up for themselves sacred pillars and ^(K)wooden images^{[b] (L)}on every high hill and under every green tree. ¹¹ There they burned incense on all the high places, like the nations whom the Lord had carried away before them; and they did wicked things to provoke the Lord to anger,