The Mekhilta cites one of the most arrogant speeches in all of Scripture to illustrate the hubris of empire. The king of Assyria declared: "My hand found, as a nest, the wealth of peoples. As one gathers abandoned eggs, I gathered all the earth. No one flapped a wing or opened a mouth to peep" (Isaiah 10:14).
The metaphor is deliberately belittling. The Assyrian king compared the nations of the world to a bird's nest left unguarded, its eggs abandoned. He reached in and took everything, and no one resisted. Not a wing flapped. Not a beak opened. The conquered peoples were not even worth the dignity of being called enemies. They were empty nests, abandoned eggs, silent and helpless before the might of Assyria.
The Mekhilta quotes this boast to set up a devastating contrast. The same Assyrian empire that mocked the weakness of every nation it conquered would itself be destroyed by God in a single night. The angel of death struck down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers outside the walls of Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:35), and the empire that gathered nations like eggs was itself cracked and shattered. The prophetic irony is precise: the one who boasted that no mouth opened to peep would have no mouth left to speak at all. Isaiah recorded the boast not to glorify Assyria but to magnify the God who brought Assyria to its knees. The nest-raider became the abandoned egg.