Much of his life has been spent in the rural Ottawa Valley, where he farmed actively for many years simultaneously with his academic vocation.
As a medievalist, especially during the first third of his career, Jeffrey has been associated with the interpretative tradition of D. W. Robertson Jr., an approach which emphasizes medieval European authors’ knowledge of classical and Christian texts as of great importance for understanding their appeal to their original audiences.
This contrasts with the opinion advocated by C. S. Lewis and popular in the mid to late twentieth century, namely that a romantic and Celtic mythological substratum is more fundamental.
According to Jeffrey, a chief impediment to sound understanding of English literature of any period, including the present, has been the lack of biblical literacy so evident in modernity generally.
Since the 1980s, Jeffrey has attempted to remind secular critics of the formative presence of biblical narrative and symbol in the growth of the English poetic imagination.
He has edited and translated medieval texts—Latin, French, Italian and Old and Middle English, and published commentary on both Old and New Testaments.
Since the mid 1990s Jeffrey has increasingly turned his attention to comparative literary study of Chinese and Western texts.
He has argued that the dominant meta-narrative impulses of the two literary cultures are strikingly opposite teleologically; whereas Western texts tend to privilege leaving the homeland behind in search of a better country (eg.
Vergil, Exodus, early American literature), Asian texts may favor going out in search of intellectual treasure but then prioritize bringing it back to the original homeland.
(translation of texts, critical study, introductions, notes) Second edition Vancouver: Regent Press, 2001; 2006.
Levy, The Anglo Norman Lyric (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990; revised second edition by DLJ in 2006).
General Editor and Co-Author, A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).
Editor, with C. Stephen Evans, co-author, The Bible and the University (Milton Keynes and Grand Rapids: Paternoster [UK] and Zondervan [US], 2007).
16. co-author ( 6 of 9 chs), with Gregory Maillet, Christianity and Literature: a Philosophical Perspective (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 2010; 2017).
Editor, co-author, The King James Bible and the World it Made (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011).
A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, translated by Liu Guangyao et al. (Shanghai: Sanlian Academic Press, 2013).
[Chinese] “东方与西方——解决当代问题的古代智慧 [Extreme Income Disparity: Ancient Wisdom as Contemporary Counsel],” Journal of Christian Culture Studies 32.
“Poetic Desire and the Laws of Heaven: James Legge’s Shi-jing and the Translation of Consciousness,” in David Jasper, Geng Youzhuang and Wang Hai, ed.
“False Witness and Unjust Judgment in the Middle English Susanna” in Ellen Spolsky, ed.
“Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder: Artistic Depiction from the Late Middle Ages to Rembrandt,” in Robert Epstein and William Robins, eds.
Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative and Ethics; essays in honor of David Lyle Jeffrey, eds.