Johann Sebastian Bach composed the church cantata Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott (Fortunate the person who upon his God),[1] BWV 139, in Leipzig for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity and first performed it on 12 November 1724.

The cantata is scored for four vocal soloists, a four-part choir, and a Baroque instrumental ensemble of oboes d'amore, strings and basso continuo.

Bach composed Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott in his second year in Leipzig for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity.

[2][4] In the following table of the movements, the scoring, keys and time signatures are taken from Alfred Dürr's Die Kantaten von Johann Sebastian Bach.

The opening chorus is a chorale fantasia, setting the first stanza of the hymn, "Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott recht kindlich kann verlassen!"

[7] Strings and the two oboes d'amore play concertante music, to which the soprano sings the cantus firmus, and the lower voices interpret the text.

John Eliot Gardiner, who conducted the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, noted that they speak of "child-like trust of the true believer" in the first section of a bar form, of "all the devils" in the second, and finally "he nonetheless remains at peace" in the third.

[4] A bass aria begins with the text "Das Unglück schlägt auf allen Seiten um mich ein zentnerschweres Band" (Misfortune on every side winds about me a hundredweight chain).

While his widow passed the parts to the city of Leipzig in 1750, which held them in the library of the Thomanerchor, much of his son's inheritance is lost, including this cantata.

[2] Winfried Radeke and William H. Scheide independently produced similar attempts to reconstruct the missing part of the second movement in the 1970s.