Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, And to those who are secure on the mountain of Samaria, The notable men of the chief of the nations, To whom the house of Israel come!
"Woe to them that are at ease in Zion ..." This is the second great woe, the first being in  Amos 5:18, where it is written.  "Woe unto you that desire the day of Jehovah!"  Zion here is the poetic name of Jerusalem, and some of the commentators would like to get it out of the text on the basis that, "It would seem out of keeping with his habit of concentration upon the immediate situation for him";[4] but such a view ignores one of the outstanding features of Amos, the fact that Judah is by no means left out of these prophecies of destruction, as in  Amos 2:4,5; 3:1; 5:1,5, etc. To be sure Amos was sent particularly to the Northern Kingdom; but Judah is always in the back of his mind; for it is not the Northern Kingdom only, but, "The whole family which I brought up out of the land of Egypt" (Amos 3:1) which is under the judgment of God for their sins.  Hammershaimb has brilliantly refuted the allegations of those intent upon disturbing the validity of the text here as it has come down to us.  "We must nevertheless keep the Masoretic Text, which must be understood as showing the threat worked out with poetic parallelism against the two capital cities."[5]