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"You want me to get God to take a quiz?" Landers asks.

They do, and my dad wrote it: What's the true origin of the universe? Did man fall from grace in the Garden of Eden? Will there be a Judgment Day for man? For writing the questions in large Aramaic script, my father received payment of $100 and a set of deluxe felt-tip pens.

Many years later, the producers of the hit sci-fi TV series The X-Files summoned him. As the script for one episode had it, an old woman was throwing a clay pot when Jesus uttered the words that raised Lazarus from the dead. The words were encrypted in the bowl's grooves as the clay dried. If the bowl shattered, the words would once again raise the dead—or so the show's writers would have us believe.

Inside a sound studio on the Fox lot, a producer asked my father to recite, "Lazarus, come forth," in Aramaic. That was easy. But then the producer asked him to say, "I am the walrus," in Aramaic. The writers, it seemed, wanted to poke fun at conspiracy-minded Beatles fans. Better acquainted with Israeli folk albums than he was with The Magical Mystery Tour, my father didn't get any of this.

"Em, may I ask," my father said timidly, "what is the connection between this 'I am a walrus' and Lazarus?"

The producer replied with a curt, "Don't worry."

The trouble, my father explained, was that walruses were not native to Aramaic-speaking lands, which were mainly mountainous.

"A synonym?"

My father thought for a moment. Then, as the tapes rolled, he delivered a line perhaps never before spoken in Aramaic. "Ana kalbid maya," he said. I am the dog of the sea.

On the drive home, my father worried that the episode might offend the devout. But when it aired one evening in April 2000, his voice—which an actor playing an FBI sound engineer "teases out" of the bowl—was barely audible.

"And anyway," I tried to assure him, "how many X-Files fans know Aramaic?"

Shabbily dressed, with hair that would make a Hollywood stylist cringe, my father is not a glamorous man. The entertainment studios never offered him much money, and in his innocent, old-world way, he never asked for more.

He was just happy that there, in Los Angeles, light-years from his childhood home in Kurdish Iraq, someone—anyone—wanted to speak his language.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Ariel Sabar, a Washington, D.C.-based journalist, is the author of My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.

Christianity Today previously wrote about how Aramaic could disappear in four decades.

Christian History & Biography explained the history of Aramaic.

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September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9