No! It's not a relative value. It's Absolute!
'nothing' literally means 'no thing'
but linguistically, 'nothing' is a noun
nouns denote things
so grammatically 'nothing' denotes something (which is not a thing).
If I try to explain what nothing is, I have to start with a thing, so that we can see when the thing is absent. It's impossible to understand nothing without first understanding that there is a thing, because we do not see the nothing, if there is nothing to see.
There is plenty of connotation attached to the word 'nothing'. Like all words, 'nothing' is not simply what it is defined to be, but also the things it is associated with. For example, someone might say that a black hole is nothing, because it appears to be nothing, because light does not escape it's event horizon. We understand that there is something there ('mass' or 'energy'), but we can't see it. The absence of things to see is like the absence of things. So black holes appear as if they are nothing; they are black. They aren't a particular color except whatever color we use to denote the lack of a color (which happens to be the color black).
When we talk about the universe coming from nothing, we have our conception things, in particular the things that comprise the universe. But these things that comprise the universe really only make sense to us to the extent that we already know about these things that comprise the universe. Anything in the universe that we don't know about, can't be conceived to not be there, because they are not conceived to have been there in the first place (even if they really are there).
So we are really truly left with a conundrum. We can't actually understand what the nothing before the universe existed was an absence of without understanding what thing the universe is in it's entirety.
God may be absolute, but man is relative.
If you want to say that before the universe was, there was
absolutely nothing, understand that this is not quite the same thing as saying that before the universe was, there was nothing. Linguistically, we would attach the modifier of 'absolutely' to more clearly define what we mean by saying 'nothing' because 'nothing' is a word that is insufficient to the task. By using the word 'absolute', we can denote a value or principle that may be viewed without relation to other things.
IMO.