22 ...The Virgin Daughter of Zion holds you in contempt;
she laughs you to scorn.
The Daughter of Jerusalem shakes her head at you.
23 Whom have you mocked and ridiculed?
Against whom have you raised your voice,
lifting your eyes to high heaven?
Against the Holy One of Israel!
24 By your servants you have blasphemed my Lord.
You thought, On account of my vast chariotry
I have conquered the highest mountains,
the farthest reaches of Lebanon.
I have felled its tallest cedars, its choicest cypresses.
I have reached its loftiest summit, its finest forest.
25 I have dug wells and drunk of foreign waters.
With the soles of my feet
I have dried up all Egypt’s rivers!
26 Have you not heard
how I ordained this thing long ago,
how in days of old I planned it?
Now I have brought it to pass.
You were destined to demolish fortified cities,
turning them into heaps of rubble,
27 while their timorous inhabitants
shrank away in confusion,
becoming as wild grass, transiently green,
or like weeds on a roof
that scorch before they grow up.
28 But I know where you dwell,
and your comings and goings,
and how stirred up you are against me.
29 And because of your snortings
and bellowings against me,
which have mounted up to my ears,
I will put my ring in your nose
and my bit in your mouth
and turn you back by the way you came.
30 But to you this shall be a sign:
This year eat what grows wild,
and the following year what springs up of itself.
But in the third year sow and harvest,
plant vineyards and eat their fruit:
31 the remnant of the house of Judah that survives
shall once more take root below and bear fruit above.
32 For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant,
and from Mount Zion a band of survivors.
The zeal of Jehovah of Hosts will accomplish it.