I'm not clear on how git revert works. For example, I want to revert to a commit six commits behind the head, reverting all the changes in the intermediary commits in between.

Say its SHA hash is 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d. Then why can't I just do something like:

git revert 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d

If you want to commit on top of the current HEAD with the exact state at a different commit, undoing all the intermediate commits, then you can use reset to create the correct state of the index to make the commit.

# Reset the index and working tree to the desired tree
# Ensure you have no uncommitted changes that you want to keep
git reset --hard 56e05fced
Move the branch pointer back to the previous HEAD
git reset –soft “HEAD@{1}”
git commit -m “Revert to 56e05fced”