Garnish

Garnish in biblical usage refers to the decoration or adornment of a surface with precious stones, gilding, or artistic embellishment. Solomon garnished the interior of the temple with precious stones for beauty (2 Chronicles 3:6), indicating the application of decorative stonework to the walls and surfaces of the sacred building. The vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation describes its foundations as garnished with every manner of precious stone (Revelation 21:19), using the Greek kosmēō (to adorn or decorate).

The term also appears in Jesus's rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees: they build and garnish the tombs of the prophets while being the children of those who killed them (Matthew 23:29) — the beautification of prophets' tombs while rejecting the living prophetic word represents a hollow religiosity that honors the dead and persecutes the living. In the parable of the unclean spirit, the empty, swept, and garnished house represents a soul from which one evil has departed but which has no positive spiritual content to prevent its reoccupation by seven worse spirits (Matthew 12:44).