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.