Various allusions to world events and biblical stories are threaded throughout "Lady Lazarus," and are either used or subverted in order to enhance the speaker's metaphors of suffering, victimhood, and lack of autonomy.
In the title of the poem, the speaker of "Lady Lazarus" explicitly positions herself as the female version of Lazarus, a man who was resurrected by Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John from the Bible. She also alludes to Lazarus by calling herself a "walking miracle" in line 4, as the resurrection of Lazarus was considered one of Jesus's miracles, and when she mentions "Jew linen" in line 9, which references the sort of shroud that would have been wrapped around Lazarus's body. Yet the allusion is complicated. It directly captures the speaker's metaphorical description of herself as dying and returning to life, yet the allusion also informs the poem in the ways that Lazarus differs from the speaker. Lazarus, a man, is brought back from the dead once, and it is a joyous occasion. But the speaker, a woman, describes herself as being brought back from dead multiple times, and each time against her will. Thus, through this allusion, the speaker conveys her lack of bodily autonomy while simultaneously demonstrating the seemingly limitless power of her oppressors.
The speaker also references the Holocaust several times throughout the poem, equating her suffering to that of the Jewish people during WWII. In line 5, the speaker describes her skin as a "Nazi lampshade," and later in lines 76-78 evokes imagery from the mass crematoriums of concentration camps, listing items often stolen from the remains of cremated prisoners remains: "A wedding ring/ A gold filling." These allusions position the speaker as a victim of overwhelming and systemic oppression, using imagery from what is considered one of the worst atrocities of human history, while also demonstrating the cruelty of the speaker's oppressors by comparing them, by extension, to Nazi soldiers. (It is arguable that such comparisons used by the speaker are offensive, in the sense that the speaker's experience of patriarchal oppression can't really be compared to the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust.)
The speaker also potentially alludes to the popular nursery rhyme, "Ring Around the Rosie," when she says "Ash, ash—" describing what is left of her body in line 73. The nursery rhyme, oddly enough, is about death and dying, with lyrics that sing, "Ashes, ashes! We all fall down!" This allusion could be a sort of ironic nod by the speaker to the nursery rhyme, considering that the speaker wishes she could "fall down" and die, but is never allowed to.