Class is like this:
1 midterm (35%)
1 midterm paper (25%)
1 final paper(40%)
1 mandatory office hour visit

Midterm was very easy, but the papers were hard.

Ra'Anan , may be a good scholar (may be not) but definitely is not a good professor.
He chose sources for us to use to write the papers about. We were not allowed to study from any other sources outside of the ones he assigned us. That's not the bad part though.

For the midterm paper, I was busting an all-nighter and I wasn't paying attention to what I was writing. I accidentally fabricated a source that helped his opinion. He approved of it. He gave me a C for my paper because he misread one of my points to be contrary to his opinion (I don't agree with his scholastic stance but for the paper, I wrote it to be parallel to his stance). I asked for a grade appeal, because I knew he read it wrong. Then, after seeing that he misread my point, he fixed my grade.

I was extremely unenthusiastic about my final paper so I did the best I can to fill up the word count (e.g instead of "Gene, a man" I wrote "A man by the name of Gene"). It was the worst paper I ever wrote in my life. I got an A on the paper, so I'm assuming he barely even read my paper.

In short, he is a boring lecturer, and a bad teacher who values spotlighting his scholastic opinion more than accurately teaching students. I would not recommend him

If you want to do well in this class you're going to have to write the essays with his opinion in mind. I had to rewrite mine because I disagreed with his opinion on Jews being monotheistic in ancient times. He limits the resources we can use to prove that very important point. While the essay question allowed room for opinion, we were all surprised when he wanted the essay to go in his direction. I've never had another professor that did this. I found myself rewriting an essay persuasively that goes against all of my beliefs, and if you read that essay you will actually believe that Jews believed in many gods in ancient times and were in fact one in the same as the Canaanite people, which is completely unknown. They could have been influenced by the Canaanites and other religions and cultures surrounding them. While we were allowed to use 3 sources, those 3 sources were very short and the psalm to prove monotheism was written by a prophet much later than the time period he was focusing on. So it isn't accurate.
I was left with a weird feeling after this class and if you take the material literally and believe everything that you learn in this class as a religious Jew, this could have a negative effect on your belief system.
Aside from that, midterm was easy and didn't have anything to do with opinion, just facts. Know the date for each term on the midterm and as always there's an essay in the end. Final was a take home essay- 10 pages. Easy A. Many people in the class missed a lot of lectures. It's no big deal. Just write that first essay with his opinion in mind and you'll get an easy A.
Good luck!