Playing it Safe

   Whatever the details of that story, I believe the important thing to remember is that it could be very wrong to induce some general case from that specific one.  It probably doesn't mean people will die by magic in every case.  It could mean they should not die by anything but magic.  It could mean those people died from something like shame, or perhaps their guilt was more serious for other reasons not listed.

   Obviously if you are going to go around trying to apply some rule to every case even remotely similar to every passage of the Bible you find, you can easily get it wrong.  Bible interpretation is not a job for amateurs.  This particular passage makes that obvious.