Holly Bible - KJV with Concise Commentaries by Z Selam - HTML preview
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1. How Cain is protected in wrath by this declaration, notified, we may suppose, to all that little world which was then in being: Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold, because thereby the sentence he was under (that he should be a fugitive and a vagabond) would be defeated. Condemned prisoners are under the special protection of the law; those that are appointed sacrifices to public justice must not be sacrificed to private revenge. God having said in Cain's case, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, and it would have been a daring usurpation for any man to take the sword out of God's hand, a contempt put upon an express declaration of God's mind, and therefore avenged seven-fold.
Note, God has wise and holy ends in protecting and prolonging the lives even of very wicked men. God deals with some according to that prayer, Slay them not, lest my people forget; scatter them by thy power, Ps 59:11. Had Cain been slain immediately, he would have been forgotten (Ec 8:10); but now he lives a more fearful and lasting monument of God's justice, hanged in chains, as it were.
2. How he is marked in wrath: The Lord set a mark upon Cain, to distinguish him from the rest of mankind and to notify that he was the man that murdered his brother, whom nobody must hurt, but everybody must hoot at. God stigmatized him (as some malefactors are burnt in the cheek), and put upon him such a visible and indelible mark of infamy and disgrace as would make all wise people shun him, so that he could not be otherwise than a fugitive and a vagabond, and the off-scouring of all things.
Scofield Bible Commentary:
Mark i.e. for Cain's protection. The law of Genesis 9:6 was not yet enacted.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown (JFB) Commentary: