Reply To: Died by sneezing

The problems I have are:

1) That’s not the way things work in the natural world as we know it. And Hashem generally works within the realms of nature.
2) If Hashem changed that nature, we should have historical evidence of such a radical change form other cultures.
3) People sometimes do not get sick before they die; they die suddenly. Even great people.
4) People definitely had physical weaknesses when they got older, even before Yakov’s time. (Yitzchak became blind, as an example)
5) There’s a concept in Pirkie Avos about doing teshuva one day before your death, which the commentaries expound upon to mean that one should do teshuva every day, since one doesn’t know their day of death. This seems a direct contradiction to what Yakov was trying to accomplish.

There are certainly more issues than these, but this should suffice for now.