From what I’ve read (which isn’t an awful lot on that specific subject) it is my understanding that in the sense that God is the fundamental cause, and that nothing happened without His approval, yes, but not in the sense that God is proximate cause. That is, God was not thought of explicitly reaching out and plucking the leaf from the tree, but that God designed whatever processes by which the leaf fell (knowing that it would fall) and that He could quiet easily cause something else to happen instead if He so chose.
Unfortunately, I can’t find a link at the moment, but Fr. Barron explained it well, I thought (if I can find one, I’ll post it). You can actually see the same sort of way of speaking in recentish (1800s? plus or minus a century or two) Christian writtings as well: explorers saying that God brought them food because they found animals when hunting etc. The idea isn’t so much that every action is an isolated case of God deciding what will happen independently of everything else and of reaching out - possibly in opposition to nature - to make it happen, but that even purely natural phenomenon occur at God’s pleasure and under His control. Providence, in short.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think the ancient Isrealites viewed it much differently.
