The three religious groups in Palestine clung to their own scripts and dialects. The Samaritan sect, which broke off from Judaism, held on to the ancient Canaanite script, using it to produce its own Aramaic translation. East Aramaic is divided into three distinct languages on the same grounds as West Aramaic. These are the Syriac language of the Christians, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Mandaean, the language of the Mandaean Gnostic sect. There is a wealth of literature in Syriac, which is still the liturgical language of the Syriac churches, and can be heard as far afield as in the 'Assyrian churches' in Sweden.
Syriac script is cursive and looks rather like Arabic.
Hebrew script was used to write Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the main cultural centers of which were in the central part of modern-day Iraq. Syriac and Babylonian Aramaic died out as spoken languages around the year 1000 and were replaced by Arabic. The esoteric religion of the Mandaeans was based on the Gnostic doctrine of Antiquity. Hebrew was originally written in the Canaanite-Phoenician alphabet , but in the 4th century BC the Jews adopted from Aramaic the square alphabet still in use. By the 3rd century BC, Hebrew was spoken only in Judaea, and even there in a modified form known as Mishnaic.