Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.
Thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth х haa'ªdaamaah (H127), the red earth] - the portion of ground I have been so long accustomed to cultivate; the place of my birth, the home of my parents, my native country.
And from thy face shall I be hid - i:e., from the symbols of thy divine presence; the usual place of religious assemblies, which, after the expulsion from Eden, the Lord established at the gates of the forfeited paradise.
I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth. Driven from my happy home, and from all association with human society, I am to be banished, a solitary wanderer, without shelter, and without a settled place of abode, in wild, uninhabited regions; or, if I venture to approach the haunts of men, everyone that findeth me shall slay me. Either some of the nearest kinsmen of Abel although there is no evidence that the practice of the Go'el (H1352), i:e., blood-avenger, had as yet been introduced, or, under an overwhelming consciousness of guilt, he expressed an apprehension that every person who should discover him in any quarter would deem himself at liberty, nay, bound, to avenge the crime. Whichever of these views we adopt involves the conclusion, that the population of the world had now considerably multiplied, and in a few years more would be further increased. In explanation of this extraordinary and obscure episode, it may be remarked, that the murder of Abel, being probably the first heinous crime in human society demanding exemplary punishment, God, who still continued His condescending direction of the first inhabitants of the world, thought proper to interpose, and to act as judge in this unhappy case.
The government was patriarchal. Adam, being ignorant both how to prove and to punish the unprecedented crime of murder, and, moreover, unlikely, through the influence of parental feelings to execute justice upon the criminal if convicted, the Lord, who is described in the anthropomorphic style of this primitive narrative, hears of it by the cry of blood which rose "from the ground." And He discovers the crime by arraigning the murderer at His tribunal. The sentence, according to the murderer's own sense of justice, should have been one of death; because that is evidently implied in the last clause of the verse. But, although capital punishment was not inflicted upon Cain, and, for reasons connected with the early state of the world, it was commuted into perpetual exile, the sentence, when thus altered on Cain's urgent petition, was far more severe, as it removed him far away from the means by which his misery, if it should prove intolerable, might be at once terminated, at least in this world. To use the words of Dr. Hall, 'God saw that it was too much favour for him to die; He therefore wills that which Cain wills. Cain would live: it is yielded to him, but for a curse. God rejects him; the earth repines at him; men abhor him; himself now wishes that death which he feared, and no man dare pleasure him with a murder.' The fact is, that his preservation in the special circumstances, as a monument of the divine displeasure would, in the early state of mankind, tend to stamp a deeper brand of horror on the crime of murder than the shedding of Cain's blood would have done; and in the secret remorse of which he must have been the prey, as well as in the consciousness of moral degradation and infamy among men, life would be felt often to be an intolerable curse. `Happier, in my mind, was he that died, For many deaths has the survivor suffered.'