This paper brings the linguistic concept of valence to bear on the long-standing crux of Genesis 1:1. I argue that debates over the verse’s grammar and meaning are largely (if not entirely) traceable to a single fundamental oversight: ראשית, as a part-whole (lexically) relational noun, is a noun having an inherent association with another noun / nominal. This means that ראשית is an argument-taking noun: it requires an argument (an obligatory sentence constituent) to be fully meaningful (i.e., it has the property of “valence,” a term borrowed from the field of chemistry). As an inherently relational noun, ראשית retains this valency property (i.e., an argument is necessarily implied at the grammar’s deep structure) even where its argument is unrealized on the grammar’s surface structure (i.e., where ראשית lacks a complement, an argument’s formal realization), a point confirmed by an exhaustive analysis of the noun in Classical Hebrew. In such cases (to use Thomas Herbst’s categories), the noun’s complement is “optional”; it has been omitted because it is readily recoverable from context. The payoff of these linguistic insights for Gen. 1.1 is this: the question is not whether ראשית implies an argument here, but what that argument is. Which leads to the paper’s main proposal: realizing what the unrealized argument of ראשית is (explicitly mentioned, I argue, three times in Gen. 2:1-3) elegantly solves the grammatical and semantic conundrums that have long puzzled interpreters of Genesis 1:1 (e.g., Is ראשית in construct with the following ברא, in the absolute state, or does it head a restrictive relative clause [so Robert Holmstedt]? Is the verse a summary statement, or does it describe a specific event? Is ברא to be understood in functional [so John Walton] or material [the traditional view] terms? Is “heaven and earth,” as is commonly asserted, a merism or not?).