If that part was from J source, Harold Bloom's "The Book of J" speculates that J was a woman with a womanly eye for a particular kind of irony, who gathered and edited together the Israelite folklore she liked best. I only read a little of the book a long time ago, but what I vaguely remember is that the instances Bloom pointed to as "ironic" included stories containing dependencies of God's actions on human actions which one would have expected from the logic of the setting should be impossible or nonsensical.