This may well be the case, or it may be the false gods are such things as money and charismatic humans. I don’t think as a pragmatic matter it makes much difference. There may be a third alternative though.

At the time most of the Bible was written, all cultures were infused with a high-level of superstitious beliefs. Ordinary physical events they did not understand were often attributed to the intervention of God (Yahweh) or a lesser god. The fact that the Old Testament in particular acknowledges other gods and that prohibition against worshiping them appears in the 10 Commandments may well be an indicator that much of what appears in the Bible is a matter of simple superstition rather than divine inspiration.

I think we have to be careful about reading the Bible as the literal inerrant word of God. While much of it is inspiring, It is full of inaccuracies and ignorant explanations of rather ordinary phenomena. The people who wrote it were trying their best to describe how the universe worked and our place in it, but they got many things wrong.

Using crude historical and ignorant standards to govern the conduct of a modern society is not only not useful, it is quite frankly dangerous, as is being proven every day by the rise of the Christian fascist nationalist movement. We have to be careful about what we give credence to in the Bible.

In my opinion, the very portions of Scripture that you highlight strongly illustrate the dangers of blindly accepting all of the Bible at face value to form our understanding of the divine and our relationship to God.