This has been a common hypothesis in critical religious studies for a while… I encountered it back in my undergrad days some 25~ years ago. It depends on a number of very questionable assumptions, many of which are sustainable only by presuming an anti supernatural/naturalistic world view from the beginning.
Firstly, the entire endeavor rests on the assumption (a huge assumption) that there is no God in reality, and that every religious belief (polytheism, monotheism, etc.) is simply a baseless and erroneous speculation. Or, short of that, you could also, theoretically, have someone who is essentially deist, who believes in some concept of a God but absolutely one who they know has not bothered communicating anything about himself to humanity.
These are very problematic starting points, and essentially make them beg the question. They have to assume that there is no God to arrive at their conclusion that religion developed apart from revelation from God. They utterly discount any evidence, theory or proposition a priori from consideration that would suggest or support any religious belief cake from revelation from God about his own nature.
When you develop a complicated argument by begging the question, you arrive at a predetermined conclusion. So people that began their “research” (I use the term loosely) by assuming that God was in no way involved in the development of any religious belief arrive at the conclusion that human interaction and societal factors alone are responsible for all religious beliefs.
What a truly stunning and unexpected development in scholarship… I think I’m going to have a heart attack and die from not surprise…
As for this work in particular, I haven’t read it specifically, but I’m am familiar enough with the general trend and many of the concepts. The approach 1) dismisses without consideration the possibility that all the various polytheistic beliefs devolved from earlier monotheistic practices and beliefs of Israel’s early ancestors, 2) takes aberrations such as the reality of syncretism (the fact that some ancient Jews were tempted and succumbed to polytheistic worship) and interprets it as the norm, and 3) confuses language where Israel acknowledged the “real” existence of other (false) gods (I.e., the reality that Baal and Asherah were really worshipped, and perhaps were real demons exercising power) as evidence they embraced a full blown polytheistic system, and finally 4) uses language where God is described as holding court in the heavens with his angels, or references to the sons of God, as a holdover from a polytheistic counsel.
That is a quick overview of at least some of the factors involved that I studied and summarily rejected, mostly because as mentioned it’s utter dependence on the anti supernatural a priori assumption on which all this rests. If perchance this was helpful, I’d be happy to address any further questions.