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,
and 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 turn fortified cities
    into heaps of ruins,
²⁶ while 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?

²⁷ “But I know your sitting down
    and your going out and coming in,
    and your raging against me.
²⁸ Because you have raged against me
    and your arrogance has come into 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.