If God was originally conceived as something which could indeed be seen with human eyes, why the change? Why transform the original beliefs of the Pentateuch and its author? The answer is very simple - Plato. Plato changed everything for Judaism. I have long argued that Christianity = Judaism + Plato. Plato made it impossible for Jews to claim that their elders "saw God and they ate and drank."
Marqe read Plato and he reads 'glory' for God in Exodus 24. Philo much the same thing by implication. Yet when you really think about it, Christianity takes matters to the other extreme doesn't it? Instead of hiding God and saying that all the Israelites saw was an angel, the Christian myth presents God as getting more in our faces. He comes down to earth, walks around, bothers everyone. What's up with that?
The answer has to be that the author of this myth is going along fully with Marqe (assuming the Christian Mark was someone else) and saying, the god of the ancient Israelites was a living man. Isn't it also strange that the modern religionist doesn't even see divine apparitions any more. It's amazing how no one notices that the religious experience keeps changing.
No one sees anything divine any more. The religious world of even our recent ancestors was so filled with divine apparitions - and yet everyone is supposed to still believe even though the signs that there is a God have all disappeared (first God, now the neo-Platonists take away even the signs of his being).
It's going to be very hard for my son and his generation to be religious.
Stephan Huller has had a life long interest in religion and spirituality 
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."