Samir Arbache holds a Licence in Biblical Philology (1974), a Licence in Theology (1975), and a Licence in Oriental Philology and History (1975), all from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). He also holds a DEA in Philology and Textual Criticism (1989) from the Université de Montpellier, and a Doctorate in Philosophy and Letters, specialisation in Arabic World Studies, from the Université Michel de Montaigne - Bordeaux 3 (1994), with a dissertation entitled: An Ancient Arabic Version of the Gospels: Language, Text and Lexicon.

He is Emeritus Professor of Theology and History of Religions at the Faculty of Theology of the Université Catholique de Lille, specialising in the history of the Arabisation of Christianity. His principal research focuses on the Sinai Arabic manuscript 72, dated 897, which contains the complete text of the four Gospels translated from Greek. He served as head of Semitic Languages at the Centre Informatique et Bible at the Abbey of Maredsous, where he worked on the processing of biblical texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Arabic, as well as the creation of multilingual lexicons (1978-1983). He taught introductory courses on the Bible and Islam in Arabic in Jerusalem (1990-1991). He has numerous publications on Christianity and Islam spanning the years 1985 to 2026.

From 1993 to 2022, he taught the following subjects at the Faculty of Theology of the Université Catholique de Lille: Christology; The Mystery of the Trinity; Theology of Religious Pluralism; Interreligious Relations (Christianity and Islam); the Desert Fathers; Eastern Patrology; Textual Criticism of the New Testament; Introduction to Islam; The Three Monotheisms; the Quran; the Arabic Language; The Cultural Heritage of the Near East.

From 2020 to 2025, he contributed to the Institut chrétiens d'Orient (ICO) from its founding, teaching the following subjects: Christians under the Abbasid Empire; Religious and Liturgical Approaches (Part 1) and Political and Socio-Cultural Approaches (Part 2); Eastern Christian Communities (Antiquity); The Eastern Monastic Ideal; Versions of the Bible; Christianity in the 4th and 7th Centuries.