Isaiah

10 Ha, you that establish usages of villainy and write troublemaking documents 2 to sidetrack poor men’s claims and steal the rights of the downtrodden of my people, that you may make booty of widows and plunder orphans! 3* And what will you do for a day of punishment and for a storm that comes from far away? to whom will you flee for help and where will you leave your fortunes, 4* except to crouch under prisoners and fall under killed men? With all this his anger has not gone back, his hand is still stretched out.

5* Ha, the Assyrian, rod of my anger and stick of my hostility! 6 I send him upon an irreligious nation and commission him against the people of my wrath to carry off booty and lift plunder and reduce them to a trampled mass like street clay. 7 But he is not thinking of that and his mind is not planning for that; what he has in mind is to deal destruction, and stamp out nations not a few. 8 For he thinks “Are not my generals one and all kings? 9 Is Calno not like Carkemish or is Hamath not like Arpad or is Samaria not like Damascus? 10 As I laid hands on the kingdoms of the trumpery gods, when their carvings surpassed Jerusalem’s and Samaria’s, 11 shall I not do to Jerusalem and its idols the same as I did to Samaria and its trumperies?”

12** And when the Lord finishes off all his work on Mount Sion and in Jerusalem, he will punish the outgrowth of the Assyrian king’s self-sufficiency and the bravado of his arrogance, 13* because he thinks “By my strength of hand I did it and by my wisdom, because I am sagacious; and I have put boundaries of peoples out of the way and pillaged their reserves, and sent settled populations down to the pit; 14 and I laid hands on the wealth of the peoples as if it were a bird’s nest, as one gathers abandoned eggs I gathered all the earth, and there was no one to flutter a wing or open a mouth or chirp.”

15 Is an ax to brag against the one who chops with it, or a saw to put on airs against the one who saws with it? as if a baton waved the one who lifts it, or a stick lifted the one who is not wood. 16* So the Lord Jehovah of Armies will send dwindling to his fattest parts, and under his glory will be lighted a combustion like that of fire; 17 and Israel’s Light will become a fire and his Holy One a flame, and it will burn and eat up his brambles and briers in one day. 18* And to the glory of his bush and his garden-land, soul and body, he will put an end; and it will be like a diseased man’s wasting away; 19 and the remnant of the trees of his bush shall be few, a boy may list them.

20 And on that day the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob shall never again lean on him who struck them, but shall lean on Jehovah, Israel’s Holy One, in good faith. 21* A remnant shall come back, 22 the remnant of Israel, to a divine champion. For if your people, Israel, be like the sand of the sea, a remnant shall come back; there is in it a decisive shrinkage, a washing-out flood of rightness. 23* For the Lord is bringing a crisis and a finish in the middle of all the earth.

24 So the Lord Jehovah says “My people that live in Sion, do not be afraid of Assyria that is beating you with a cudgel and lifting its stick over you in Egyptian fashion; 25* for in a very little bit longer, hostility will be finished and my anger against the world will be spent.” 26 And Jehovah will brandish a whip over him as in the beating of Midian at Raven Rock, and his stick over the sea, lifting it in the Egyptian fashion. 27* And on that day his load will come off from your shoulder and his yoke be left off from your neck.

28 He has taken ʽOphni by surprise, has come to Ghaijath, has passed through Migron, has deposited his baggage at Micmas, 29* has gone over the crossing, Gebaʽ is his place for the night; Ramah is in a panic, Gibeah of Saul has taken flight. 30 Shriek, daughter of Gallim; listen, Laishah; answer her, Anathoth. 31 Madmenah has flitted; the inhabitants of Gebim have taken to cover. 32 This very day at Nob, for halting, he swings his hand toward the mountain of the house of Sion, the hill of Jerusalem.

33* Lo, the Lord Jehovah of Armies is clearing off timber in an awful scene, and the tall are chopped down and the high brought low, 34* and the thickets of the rocks are cut back with iron and the Lebanon falls by the ax.