The Nimrod most people know, the arrogant king who builds the Tower of Babel and persecutes Abraham, is almost entirely a creation of post-biblical interpretation rather than the Genesis text itself, which never places him at Babel's tower and never mentions Abraham in connection with him at all. Genesis Rabbah, the classical rabbinic midrash on Genesis compiled in the land of Israel in roughly the fourth or fifth century CE, preserves some of the earliest surviving versions of the expanded story, reading Nimrod's hunting and his city building together as evidence of a man who set out to dominate other men, and connecting him, by proximity of the Babel narrative in the biblical text and by his standing as Mesopotamia's founding tyrant, to the tower's construction. The furnace narrative, in which Nimrod, enraged at the young Abraham's refusal to worship idols, has him thrown into a fire from which God delivers him unharmed, develops across rabbinic sources over subsequent centuries and reaches a parallel, independently developed form in Islamic tradition, where the tyrant king who orders Ibrahim burned, unnamed in the Quran itself, is identified as Nimrod, Namrud, by the later tafsir commentary tradition, exactly the same pattern of a spare scriptural notice expanded by interpreters working after the fact.
By the medieval period Nimrod had become, across Jewish, Christian and Islamic retelling alike, the paradigm case of the overreaching ruler who defies heaven, sturdy enough as a figure of speech that "nimrod" entered ordinary usage in more than one language as a byword for exactly that kind of tyranny, a legacy built almost entirely on four spare verses of genealogy.