Why would a kind and loving God be slow to hear the cries of his children? Why does he not respond immediately? This prophecy captures the fact that the Lord works on multiple levels. This particular promise of being “slow to hear their cries” comes only after the second failure of the Noahites to repent. In the first place, they had not repented with sufficient sincerity to avert their bondage; their second failure came because they lamented the bondage itself, not their sin. Thus, they had not yet truly turned to Yahweh.
The social transformation of the faithful people of Zeniff into the idolatrous people of Noah is a great change, and the seduction of the wealth and prestige, bolstered by real or imagined “victories,” would have created powerful reasons not to repent. This “repentance” was not simply a regret for their individual sins but the renunciation of a highly profitable culture/religion as a people, and their individual and collective rededication to Yahweh. Like Israel under Moses, it took time to cast the seductive images of Egyptian leeks and seething pots out of the hearts of this smaller Israel laboring under a different kind of bondage.