Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth— that is, of this part of the earth, or country: and from thy face shall I be hid; an expression which must be restricted, as well as the former; for how could he be hid from the face of God, if we understand it of his all-seeing eye? May it not, therefore, refer to that presence of God, which was appropriated to some certain place? And therefore may we not reasonably conclude, that the same Shechinah, or Divine Presence, mentioned before, and placed at the garden of Eden, is here referred to? And indeed the word פני peni, face, here used, is generally referred to God's presence in the tabernacle, &c. It is the opinion of many, that Cain came to worship at the place appointed, when the Lord thus convicted him of his crime; an opinion the more probable, from Genesis 4:16 where it is said, Cain went out from the presence of the Lord; that is, "from the place of his peculiar presence and worship." All which, it must be observed, tends to shew the consistency of the sacred scripture, and to confirm our general plan of interpretation.
Every one that findeth me, shall slay me— By this expression, Cain demonstrates the dreadful effects of vice on the mind, which it terrifies with continual alarms, creating fear where no fear is. Hence it evidently follows, that there were many persons on the earth at this time. Now according to the computation of the best chronologers, it was in the hundred and twenty-ninth year of Adam's age that Abel was slain: for the scripture says expressly, that Seth (who was given in the lieu of Abel) was born in the hundred and thirtieth year, (very likely the year after the murder was committed,) to be a comfort to his disconsolate parents. So that Cain must have been a hundred and twenty-nine years old, when he abdicated his own country: at which time there must have been a great quantity of mankind upon the face of the earth; it may be, to the number of a hundred thousand souls:* for if the children of Israel, from seventy persons, in the space of four hundred and thirty years, became six hundred thousand fighting men, (though vast numbers must have died during this increase,) we may very well suppose, that the children of Adam, whose lives were so very long, might amount to a hundred thousand in a hundred and thirty years, which are above four generations.
* It has been shewn, that, supposing Adam and Eve to have had no other sons than Cain and Abel, in the year of the world 128; yet, as they had daughters married with these sons, their descendants would make a considerable figure on the earth. For, supposing them to have been married in the nineteenth year of the world, they might have had each of them eight children, some males and some females, in the twenty-fifth year. In the fiftieth year there might have proceeded from them, in a direct line, 64 persons; in the seventy-fourth year there would be 572; in the ninety-eighth 4096; in the hundred and twenty-second, they would amount to 32,768. If to these we add the other children descended from Cain and Abel, their children, and the children of their children, we shall have, in the aforesaid hundred and twenty-eighth year, 421,164 men above the age of seventeen, without reckoning the women, both old and young, or the males under seventeen.