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● Gen 6:4 . .There were giants on the earth in those days, and also
afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they
bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of
renown.
One of the Hebrew words for "giant" is rapha' which appears in
numerous places throughout the Old Testament and typically always
indicates brutish people of large physical stature. But that's not the word for
giants here in Gen 6:4. Instead it's ha-nepihilym which appears in only
two verses in the entire Old Testament; the one here and the other in
Numbers 13:33.
The word is somewhat ambiguous, but in this context it pertains to bullies:
especially to men famous for tyranny; e.g. Genghis Khan of Mongolia, and
Alexander the Great of Greece; Napoleon of France, Peter Alekseyevich
Romanov of Russia, Chandragupta Maurya of India, shogun Minamoto no
Yoritomo of Japan, conquistador Hernando Cortes of Spain, Timur: founder
of the Timurid dynasty, and Zahir-ud din Muhammad Babur: founder of the
Mughal dynasty that ruled the Indian subcontinent for over three centuries;
and of course guys like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Mao
Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Muammar
Gaddafi, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un.
In other words: ha-nepihilyhm doesn't necessarily indicate a unique race of
people; but mostly strong personalities, i.e. especially those whose ambition
is to quite dominate others, i.e. despots, dictators, and tyrants, etc. Those
kinds of people don't just want power: they want to compromise your
integrity, censor your information, control the content of your thoughts,
tamper with justice, suppress human rights, politicize law enforcement, force
you into accepting experimental vaccines, foster cognitive dissonance (e.g.
gender-neutral pronouns) silence dissent (they call it misinformation) and
regulate the quantity and the quality of the food on your table, etc.
Those kinds of people dominate the news and even sometimes appear
outstanding. For example Stalin was voted TIME magazine's man of the year
back in 1942.
Men (and women) who seek to dominate others are often the least suitable
to do so; and back there in Noah's day that was certainly true. The moral
quality of the world built by the governance of the ha-nepihilym was so poor
that the situation required God to step in and do something about it.
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