Ephrem lived his whole life in the Syriac-speaking world on the Roman-Persian frontier, serving as a deacon at Nisibis until the city was ceded to Persia, and then at Edessa. He is the great poet of the early Church, and he wrote theology as hymns because he thought argument alone could not carry it.
His verse works by image rather than definition — paradox, symbol, the world read as a text pointing beyond itself — and it was sung by choirs of women he trained for the purpose. Hundreds of his hymns survive, on the Nativity, on faith, on paradise. He died caring for the sick during a famine at Edessa. He is honoured as a Doctor of the Church and holds a place in Syriac Christianity that has no real parallel elsewhere.