"... we examine David’s ability to match Goliath’s rhetoric and how this reflects on his own personal qualities. In the Masoretic text we saw that it is David’s ‘marketing genius’ that convinces Saul to allow him to face Goliath in combat. In verse 35 there is a variation in the LXX where David says he caught the lion (or bear) by the ‘throat’ (φάρυγγος) rather than the ‘beard’ (ונקזב) in the Masoretic. The LXX reads more smoothly after David’s reference to both a lion and a bear because it is difficult to understand the latter as having a beard. An advantage of the MT reading is that it draws an even closer parallel between Goliath (who presumably would have had a beard) and the wild animals and dehumanizes him. Once again, this absence is balanced in the LXX by an additional speech by David in verse 43, where he answers Goliath’s rhetorical question, ‘Am I like a dog?’ with ‘No, but worse than a dog’. David’s rhetoric is important for causation because it demonstrates that he has great courage in responding to Goliath ..."

Gilmour, Rachelle Representing the Past: A Literary Analysis of Narrative Historiography in the Book of Samuel (pp. 278-279) Brill, 2011