¹And it happened, when king Hezekiah heard, that he tore his garments and covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of Yahweh.

²And he sent Eliakim, who was over the house, and Shebna the scribe, and the elders of the priests, covered in sackcloth, to Isaiah son of Amoz the prophet.

³And they said to him, Thus says Hezekiah: This day is a day of distress and rebuke and contempt; for children have come to the mouth of the womb, and there is no strength to give birth.

⁴Perhaps Yahweh your God will hear the words of the Rabshakeh, whom his lord, the king of Assyria, sent to taunt the living God, and will rebuke the words that Yahweh your God has heard; so lift up a prayer on behalf of the remnant that is found.

⁵So the servants of king Hezekiah came to Isaiah.

⁶And Isaiah said to them, This is what you are to say to your master: This is what Yahweh says: Do not be afraid in the face of the words that you heard, with which the young men of the king of Assyria reviled me.

⁷Look, I am about to put a breath in him, and he will hear a report and return to his own land, and I will make him fall by the sword in his own land.

⁸And the Rabshakeh returned and found the king of Assyria fighting against Libnah; for he had heard that he had set out from Lachish.

⁹And he heard it said of Tirhakah king of Cush: He has come out to do battle with you; and when he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying,

¹⁰Thus you shall say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let your God, in whom you trust, beguile you, saying, Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.

¹¹Look, you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the lands, devoting them to destruction; and will you be delivered?

¹²Did the gods of the nations deliver them, those whom my fathers ruined: Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of Eden who were in Telassar?

¹³Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, of Hena, and of Ivvah?

¹⁴Hezekiah took the letters from the hand of the messengers and read it aloud; then Hezekiah went up to the house of Yahweh and spread it out before the face of Yahweh.

¹⁵And Hezekiah prayed to Yahweh, saying,

¹⁶O Yahweh of hosts, God of Israel, who sits upon the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the land; you made the skies and the land.

¹⁷Incline your ear, Yahweh, and hear; open your eyes, Yahweh, and see; and hear all the words of Sennacherib, who sent to taunt the living God.

¹⁸Truly, Yahweh, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the lands and their land,

¹⁹and have put their gods in the fire; for they were not gods, but the work of human hands, wood and stone; so they wiped them out.

²⁰And now, Yahweh our God, save us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the land may know that you alone are Yahweh.

²¹Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent word to Hezekiah, saying, This is what Yahweh, the God of Israel, says: Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of Assyria,

²²this is the word that Yahweh has spoken against him: She has despised you, she has mocked you, the virgin daughter of Zion; behind you she has shaken her head, the daughter of Jerusalem.

²³Whom have you taunted and reviled? And against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes on high? Against the Holy One of Israel!

²⁴By the hand of your slaves you reproached the Lord, and you said: With the multitude of my chariots I myself went up the height of the mountains, the far flanks of Lebanon; I cut down the height of its cedars, the choicest of its cypress; and I came to the height of its end, the forest of its orchard.

²⁵I dug, and I drank waters, and I dried up with the sole of my feet all the channels of Egypt.

²⁶Have you not heard? From afar I made it, from days of old I formed it. Now I have brought it about, that you should crash fortified cities into ruined heaps.

²⁷And their dwellers, powerless of hand, were dismayed and ashamed; they were vegetation of the field and greenery of the sprouts, grass of the roofs, and a field before the standing grain.

²⁸I know your dwelling, your going out, your coming in, and your raging against me.

²⁹Because you rage against me, and your arrogance has come up into my ears, I will put my hook in your nostril and my bridle on your lips, and I will turn you back by the way you came.

³⁰And this is the sign for you: eat this year the growth from spilled kernels, and in the second year the aftergrowth; but in the third year sow and reap, plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

³¹And the escaped remnant of the house of Judah that remains will again put down a root below and produce fruit above.

³²For from Jerusalem a remnant will go out, and an escaped remnant from the mountain of Zion. The zeal of Yahweh of hosts will do this.

³³Therefore this is what Yahweh said about the king of Assyria: He will not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor advance on it with a shield, nor pour out a mound against it.

³⁴By the way he came he will return, and into this city he will not come — the utterance of Yahweh.

³⁵I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of David my slave.

³⁶Then the messenger of Yahweh went out and struck down in the camp of Assyria a hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when they rose early in the morning, there they all were corpses, dead.

³⁷So Sennacherib king of Assyria set out, and went, and returned, and dwelled in Nineveh.

³⁸It happened, as he bowed down in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons struck him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat; and Esar-haddon his son reigned in his place.