Brief accounts of Eliya's patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (fl.
A modern assessment of his reign can be found in David Wilmshurst's The Martyred Church.
He introduced the rite of genuflection on the holy Sunday of Pentecost, which the Nestorians previously did not observe.
At the end of his life he was afflicted by a paralysis of his limbs and was confined to bed.
He was consecrated on the third Sunday of the Apostles, on the seventh day of the third month of the Arabs in the year 419 [AD 1028/9] in the Greek Palace in Baghdad.