Has mankind, under Satan's sway, ever before attempted to bring the whole world under one government?
I want to draw our attention to this word before. "He was a might hunter before the Lord." The word literally means "face"—that which is in the front and which appears to another facing you, like face-to-face. Nimrod was a mighty hunter facing the Lord. The word before literally means, "that which turns." It has a wide variety of usages. It can be translated facing, before, in front of, or against.
Against is the correct translation here. You can tell that by the context. He was a mighty hunter against the Lord. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord in the sense of fighting against. You don't turn your back on your enemy. You face him and he faces you.
Nimrod was against; he was facing the LORD in battle, in antagonism, rather than in submission. That's shown in the context by his conquests. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel. There's more here than meets the eye. He conquered Babel. He conquered Erech, and Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar. He was bringing these (probably city-states) under his control and forming them into one nation. Nowhere did God give the right to dominion over other men in this regard by conquering them, and that was what Nimrod was doing.
The Sperling Translation translates that phrase, "He began to be a despot." So he was a despot against God; and he was deceiving, he was manipulating, he was controlling those that he brought under his dominion. We have the story that we went through in Genesis 11. Satan and his demons, through Nimrod, conspired against God to bring mankind into one government against God.
Remember I said before, "God doesn't destroy those things that are good. He doesn't intervene like this unless something is evil." But this was something evil against God and against God's purpose. That's why He stepped in and confused the languages, because this was something that was going directly against God's purpose, against the timeline that God had worked out in His own mind.
There we have the first example in the Bible of people under the sway of Satan. They were under the sway because they were his children spiritually and because they were antagonistic to God's purpose. That's how you can tell. They weren't submissive to it or obedient to it.
Here we have mankind's first attempt to bring all of mankind under one government. You can see right from the very beginning in the book of beginnings, Genesis, where God shows that bringing governments together under man is not part of His purpose. That's antagonistic to God.
In Genesis 9 God had given Noah the command to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth," not only with the animals, but with mankind.
This maybe taking it a little bit before what we just read there in Chapter 10, because its says that Nimrod built Babel in Shinar. Evidently what we have here is a little bit of a flashback to show you that when people migrated eastward from where the ark had landed and where they had begun to settle, that they built this city in the land of Shinar.
What was it that God had said to Noah in Genesis 9:1? "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." What they wanted to do was to build a tower in defiance of God, and build a city in which they could all gather so that they would not have to scatter themselves over the whole earth. Who was the one that they chose to lead this? Nimrod.
They chose Nimrod, who was against everything that God did, to thwart God's plan of scattering them abroad over the face of all the earth. That was their choice. They could have chosen Shem, or Noah and Shem, depending on whether Noah was still alive at the time, because it was Noah's job, and Shem's after him, to fill the whole earth with the people. But instead they chose Cush and Nimrod because their platform was, "No. Let's stay in our own little cities and stay united and build house to house (let us say) and be here cheek by jowl, and not let God tell us what to do." Instead they chose to rebel against God. They chose self-determination.
What happened is that God said, "I'm going to do what I told you to do anyway," and He confused their language and scattered them abroad over the whole earth. But they chose. That was their choice, and their punishment was a scattering and an inability to understand one another. Confusion. That just fits the mold of what we saw there in Proverbs 29:2. If they had followed the righteous leader, they would have been happy, but instead they followed the scoundrel, the wicked, and what did they have but misery. Since then things have not gotten much better.