The suggestion that God was communicating in the cultural mindset of the time just doesn't convince me.
I mostly agree with you but consider this: today we can not convey the concepts of modern physics and cosmology to the average person (even the above average). We struggle with rubber sheet analogies for GR and don't even manage that much for string theory and QM.
Today, if we tried to write for God we might think we can choose a different way to present it but we shouldn't be so sure.
Here is one view: It isn't important to get it right when communicating to the people of the time. For example, they would have had big trouble accepting that all those stars were actually suns. Much less the idea of island universes beyond that.
The issue arises because some people think that the Bible should be communicating scientifically to people
today. Obviously we would write something different today then we would have then.
To that degree I think you can make a (arguably weak) case that God was communicating to the people of the time. However, science writers for popular consumption have the struggle of simplifying something without getting it actually wrong. In this God gets a
fail.
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