He was born in Qarabash near Diyarbakır (Amid). In 1911 his bp. Iwannis Eliās Shakir (later patr. ) sent him to Dayr al-Zaʿfarān where he learned Syriac (under Elias Qoro and Dolabani), Arabic, and Turkish. In 1921 he went back to Diyarbakır, then escaped from the military service and went to Beirut, where he spent some time with Isḥāq Armalah. He taught in Beirut (1926, 1935–1936), Bethlehem (1937–39), Jerusalem (1939–51), Qamishli (1952–76), and St. Ephrem Seminary in Beirut (1972–75).

He wrote: 1. A series of Syriac readers, herge d-qeryono, from kindergarten until eighth grade which are still used today in the Middle East and the diaspora (reprinted many times). 2. A grammar titled mdaršono bqonune dlešono (Qamishli 1963, 2nd ed. 1980, 3rd ed. 1986). 3. Poems in the genre of ḥamroyotho ‘wine poems’ based on the Andalus Arabic tradition of al-khamriyyāt (Sweden, 1997). 4. An account of the Sayfo titled dmo zliḥo (Augsburg, 1997; Glane 1999); GT by George Toro and Amill Gorgis titled Vergossenes Blut (Glane, 2002); DT titled Vergoten Bloed (Glane, 2002).

Additionally, he translated the following works from Arabic into Syriac: 1. Gibran Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet and Jesus the Son of Man. 2. The Quatrains of Al-Khayyām. 3. Michael Niema’s al-awjuh. 4. Gilgamesh. 5. The sayings of Tagore from al-Bustani’s Arabic version. 6. The Code of Hamurabi. 7. Addai Scher’s Taʾrīkh kaldū wa-āthūr. A collection of his writings were edited by Gabriel Afram (Jönköping, 1994).