.
• 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 Bible's Hebrew words for "giant" is rapha' (raw-faw') 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. Instead it's nephiyl (nef-eel') which appears in only two
verses in the entire Old Testament; 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. 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.
The ambition of nephiyl is to quite dominate others. Those kinds of men
don't just want power: they want to own your soul.
Men 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 spiritual quality of the
world built by the governance of the nehiyl was so poor that the situation
required God to step in and do something about it.
• Gen 6:5 . . And the Lord saw that the evil of man was great in the earth,
and every imagination of his heart was only evil all the time.
That's pretty much the end result of tyranny because in order for the
nephiyl's management practices to succeed; any and all moral values but
their own have be suppressed. We don't have to look very far in our own
time to see that in action; for example Communist China's hostility towards
Falun Gong.
NOTE: There is currently a really informative series on NetFlix called "How
To Become A Tyrant". It's chilling to see just how many things going on right
now, right here in the USA, are in accord with the Tyrant's playbook. The
last twenty-one months in my country have been disturbing; and to think
there are yet twenty-seven more to go with the current administration.
Let me say just say this: Folks who don't think tyranny can't happen in the
USA are like a frog boiling to death by bringing its water temperature
up gradually so the poor stupid critter doesn't become alarmed.
_