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Philo – On the Posterity of Cain and his Exile

So unceasingly does Moses himself yearn to see God and to be seen by Him, that he implores Him to reveal clearly His own nature (Exodus xxxiii 13)…. So see him enter into the thick darkness where God was (Exodus xx 21) that is into conceptions regarding the Existent Being that belong to the unapproachable region where there are no material forms … And out of this quest there accrues to him a vast boon, namely to apprehend that the God of real Being is apprehensible by no one, and to see precisely this, that He is incapable of being seen….

In the great song (Deuteronomy 32) there come these words as from the lips of God ‘See that I AM’ (Deuteronomy xxxii 39), showing that He that actually IS is apprehended by clear intuition rather than demonstrated by arguments carried on in words. When we say that the Existent One is visible, we are not using words in their literal sense …. What he says is ‘See that I AM’ that is ‘Behold My subsistence’. For it is quite enough for a man’s reasoning faculty to advance as far as to learn that the Cause of the Universe is and subsists.

Exodus 20 - The Ten Commandments

18 When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance
19 and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die."