Who was Cain’s wife

[TheFonz]

There are only two possibilities:

1. A descendant of Adam and Eve. This is the only possibility if you hold the standard position that Adam and Eve were the only people expressly created by God.

2. Someone else.

Number 2 can be split into two categories:

2a. A human who had developed as a result of evolution. This theory allows for the idea that humans evolved with other primates, and further suggests that (2a1) Adam was pulled from this group and sanctified by God; or (2a2) Adam was created by God, in the Garden of Eden, but was physically no different from the homo sapiens which had evolved outside of the Garden.

2b. God created lots of people, either at the same time or not, but Adam was selected to be the father of the human race, whose descendants would be "elect" and allowed to live in the Garden. With this theory, Cain's wife was just one of the others, created by God, but not in the line of Adam.

I'm much more comfortable with 2a and 2b than I am with 1, because though Sunday school teaches that Adam and Eve were the only people on Earth, the Bible simply doesn't say that. It says that everyone on Earth is a descendant of Adam, but given that Noah was a descendant of Adam, and at one time Noah and his family were the only people alive on Earth, we're all descendants of both. 2a allows for the theory of evolution - from single celled organisms to everything we have today - to be reconcilable with Genesis. 2b allows for the precise language of Genesis to be true without any intellectual leaps to explain who lived in the Land of Nod, why Cain needed the mark, who his wife was, etc. To accept 2b as true, as I do, one must only believe that the man and woman created in Genesis 1:26 were distinct from (or at least more expansive than) the man created in Genesis 2:7.