<p>Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had questions. Ben Sira had answers. And in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical medieval text composed between 700 and 1000 CE, no question was too strange to ask - including this one: Why do sneezes exist?</p>
<p>Ben Sira's answer is blunt, earthy, and surprisingly practical. Without sneezes, he explains, people would have no warning signal from their bodies. They'd soil their clothes without advance notice, living in constant shame. But sneezes serve as the body's alarm system - a kind of divine courtesy built into the human frame. When a person feels a sneeze coming, they know it's time to attend to their physical needs, and they're spared public humiliation.</p>
<p>It's the kind of passage that makes scholars debate whether the Alphabet of Ben Sira is genuine wisdom literature or biting parody. Probably both. The text takes the Talmudic tradition of asking "Why did God create X?" and pushes it to absurd extremes - but with a real theological point underneath. In this worldview, nothing God made is purposeless. Not even the smallest, most embarrassing bodily function. Every sneeze is evidence of design.</p>