A parish priest I know believes (I think sincerely) in leprechauns. AFAIK, Catholicism has no qualms about the existence of other gods, angels/demons, or lesser naturalistic/pagan, spiritual beings. God, however, is one, and you must put Him above all things.
Strictly speaking it has nothing to say about it at all. The early Christians suspected those gods did exist (or did at one time) but apparently weren’t around anymore, and if they had been were no greater than man in relation to God. They are irrelevant.
I’m not sure I quite qualify; I consider myself theistic and yet I’m not sure I like the term “diety” and its implications. A lot of the characteristics that other folks consider a necessary prerequisite to theism, such that their absence would mean LESS of a God, are things I perceive as limitations, ranging from corporeal existence (w/regards to which many other theists tend to agree with me nowadays) to experience of the passage of time and therefore of consecutive changing thoughts & feelings.
But I’ll play…
As with the possible existence of anything that is not a manifestation of God, it may be a useful category or concept for us to use, but ultimately everything that is is part of creation (/universe / that which is) is a manifestation of God.
I’m not Judeo-Christian nor am I a Biblical scholar or a scholar of the culture and period in which it was written. Are you asking in a broad general sense whether any “holy writings” were in some fashion communicated to the author by God, or are you only asking with regards to this specific phrase written by this specific scribe in this specific holy book? If the latter, wouldn’t a cogent answer on the former be both useful and necessary first?
…with regards to graven images and “putting other Gods before me”:
Again, I’m not Judeo-Christian, but incorporating what I find valid, there has been a human attempt to substitute something concrete for the personal experience of communion with God, and then to gradually give more weight to the substitute until no personal experience via communion with God can be spoken of if it does not conform to the substitute without it being called heresy.
One such substitute might be an organized body of theologians, who vote or otherwise craft a catechism or writ which is then taught and presented as God’s Truth; the body of theologians become the authority, having the sole socially-acknowledged right to modify the catechism or question or reinterpret the writ, all others are to substitute the theologians for the direct experience.
Another such substitute might be the writ itself, the holy book, whereby it comes to pass that not even the theologians are considered to be in a position of communing directly with God as a means of going “above the book”; the book itself is held to possess an authority outweighing any experience that any person could have in directly communion with God.
I don’t know a thing about christianity or, for that matter, european religions in general. I do however find it pertinent to note that the term “god” tends to be deceptively precise when it comes to discussing comparative religion; the mythology of african and asian religions, in particular, have concepts which may be similiar (but are very decidedly never identical) to what I understand about the christian concept of god. Despite the differences, however, for brevity’s sake they often end up translating said concepts as “god” or “gods” in order to avoid a lengthy, unnecessary definition about the term.