Genesis 32:30 has Jacob say 'I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved,' Exodus 33:11 says 'the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend,' and Exodus 24:9-11 has the elders of Israel see God and eat and drink in his presence -- yet Exodus 33:20 has God tell Moses 'you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live,' and John 1:18 declares 'No one has ever seen God.'

Exodus 33 itself, within a few verses, distinguishes exactly the two senses in tension. Verse 11 says the LORD spoke to Moses 'face to face' (panim el panim), describing the mode and intimacy of ordinary prophetic communication and covenant relationship, direct and unmediated address as opposed to dreams, visions, or intermediaries (compare Num 12:6-8, which explicitly contrasts God speaking to other prophets 'in visions... in dark speech' with speaking to Moses 'mouth to mouth' -- still an idiom for the manner of communication, not a claim of beholding God's unmediated essence). Immediately after, in the same chapter, Moses asks to see God's kavod, his 'glory' (v.18), and God explicitly denies that specific request: 'you cannot see my face and live,' permitting only a partial, shielded glimpse of his 'back' (vv.20-23). Exodus 33 is self-clarifying, not self-contradictory: 'face to face' speech, relational directness, is categorically different from beholding the fullness of God's unmediated glory, and the chapter itself marks that distinction without any outside harmonizing needed. Genesis 32:30 and Exodus 24:9-11 describe real but partial, accommodated theophanic manifestations of God's presence, consistent with the relational, not ontological, sense of 'seeing' God. John 1:18 then operates explicitly at the metaphysical level: 'No one has ever seen God; God the only Son... has made him known' -- John's point, in a Gospel deeply concerned with divine self-disclosure, is that no unmediated vision of God's invisible essence (cf. 1 Tim 6:16, 'whom no one has ever seen or can see') has occurred apart from the incarnate Son. The OT theophanies are pre-incarnate, partial, accommodated self-disclosures consistent with, not contradicting, the principle that God's essential invisible nature has never been directly beheld by any creature.

This idiomatic/relational versus ontological/essential distinction is not invented ad hoc for this problem; it maps onto a broader, coherent biblical and later patristic theology of divine accommodation and incomprehensibility, further developed by the Cappadocian distinction between God's incomprehensible essence and his knowable self-manifestations, rooted already in these OT and Johannine texts.