Genesis 48:1
And it came to pass after these things, that one told Joseph, Behold, thy father is sick: and he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. And it came to pass after these things, that one told Joseph, Behold, thy father is sick: and he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.
Genesis 48:1 belongs to the later part of Joseph's story, after the seven years of famine began just as Joseph had foretold. By that time the famine had reached Canaan where Jacob lived, so ten of Jacob's sons went to Egypt to buy grain and bowed before Joseph as ruler of the land with their faces to the ground. Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him, because his name had been changed and he had grown from a youth into Egypt's prime minister.
The verse reports Jacob's sickness in his old age only a day or two before his death. This sickness is the single exception in the first 2369 years of human history in which any person is described as ill. For more than one-third of the duration of the human race, no child was born blind, deaf, mute, intellectually disabled, or malformed, no one died a natural death in infancy, childhood, early manhood, or middle manhood, no man or woman died of disease, no epidemic or endemic disease prevailed, and bodily pain from disease is nowhere recorded. Earlier histories describe death only in simple terms as dying or as dying old and full of days and years, meaning people died the natural death of healthy persons rather than the unnatural death of diseased ones. Jacob's brief sickness shows that humanity was created with bodily organs so perfect and vital force so abundant that it took more than two thousand years of indulged appetite and ignorance to make people even susceptible to disease.